Details
BIBLIA PAUPERUM. BLOCKBOOK (Schreiber xyl. ed. III). [Low Countries: ca. 1465]
Chancery 2° (252/266 x 187/190mm without margins). COLLATION: [1-202], 40 leaves signed a-v, a - v . The sheets printed on the inner side only, in pale brown occasionally greyish water-based ink, by a rubbing process, from twenty double-page woodblocks (a-b ... t - v ), the outer sides blank. Each woodcut page comprising three pictures, four portraits, and Latin text.
PAPER: a single stock, probably from a Piedmont mill, the watermark pair of a hand surmounted with a star not recorded in Briquet but belonging to his group 11088-90 and 11092-93, whose use is found from Sicily to Zeeland over a fifty-year period from the 1430s to the 1480s. This paper stock apparently not recorded in any other surviving impression of the blockbook Biblia Pauperum.
CONDITION: the bifolia now divided and each leaf remargined with Whatman paper affecting the outermost frame (replaced in manuscript with a black and red-ruled frame); a few small wormholes repaired very slightly affecting text or illustration in about twelve leaves; minor defects, mainly marginal, repaired in eight leaves and repairs along the extreme outer and/or top edges of thirteen other leaves affecting woodcut increasingly towards the end; printed surface rubbed in small central portions of fos. 1, 17-19, 21 and 26, as well as elsewhere on five other pages; defect in centre of fo. 8 restored with missing lines of illustration replaced in manuscript; crease across fos. 33-36 flattened when the leaves were pressed for rebinding; a few very minor stains; uneven inking of lower caption in fo. 35, but by whatever frottage they were produced the impressions of the double-page woodcuts have fine tone and are remarkably strong, only fo. 40 and perhaps one or two other pages showing a few lines or letters strengthened in pen-and-ink (a much more common occurrence in most other copies); although the leaves were rebound in the correct order, the codex opens with the woodcut on fo. 1 as a right-hand page instead of on the left, so that as a result the facing pages are presently not arranged as they were printed from the double-page blocks. The listing of these defects is meticulous, perhaps obscuring the fact that this extremely rare blockbook is generally in very good condition.
BINDING: English gold-tooled blue straight-grained morocco of ca. 1790, sides panelled with multiple fillets, a Greek-key outer border with a small sunburst tool in the corners, the Carysfort arms added in the centre of the front cover, flat spine decorated in compartments with foliate ornament and pointillé tooling, two roll-tooled borders on turn-ins, purple watered-silk liners, gilt edges. (Binding somewhat faded and rubbed in places.)
PROVENANCE: Jean-Baptiste Pâris de Meyzieu (not in the French edition of his 1791 London sale catalogue, but lot 4 bis in the English version, which suggests that it was a last-minute insertion by the auctioneer-bookseller James Edwards and that perhaps it was his own property rather than part of the Pâris collection, thus explaining the English binding, sold at ¨51 to); Ralph Willett of Merly, Dorset (lot 296 in his London sale of 7th December 1813, ¨257 5s); P. A. Hanrott (his inscription on provenance "The Paris Copy", condition "very fine and complete", Heinecken reference, date "A.D. (circa) 1430" and rarity "excessively rare", 1833 London sale, ¨36 15s); 4th Earl of Ashburnham (27th June 1897 Sotheby sale, lot 419, via Quaritch to); William, Earl of Carysfort (bookplate); by descent to the present owner.
In the third quarter of the fifteenth century the pictures and text of the so-called Biblia Pauperum, current in manuscript since before 1300, were modified for publication in both typographical and xylographic (or blockbook) editions. Albrecht Pfister printed one Latin and two German-language editions in 36-line Bible type, illustrated with woodcuts, Bamberg: ca. 1462-63 (GW 4325-27). In the same decade a larger number of xylographic editions appeared in the Northern and/or Southern Low Countries and Germany, which in the past have been dated as early as 1425 and as late as 1475. Blockbooks are codices produced entirely from woodblocks; the earliest editions were not printed with black oil-based ink in a press such as Gutenberg had invented, but impressions of the woodcut pages were obtained in thin watery ink by rubbing, perhaps with a flat spatula-like instrument. The technique was in rare cases combined with manuscript (chiro-xylography) or typography (notably several Dutch semi-blockbook editions of Speculum Humanae Salvationis). Blockbooks were not always illustrated (e.g. Donatus), but the technique was particularly suited to the multiplication of works that combined pictures and text, as is most integrally the case with the Biblia Pauperum. Short popular works for which there was a steady market, such as Latin grammars for students, illustrated meditative texts for priests, almanacs for everybody, could be cheaply and simply republished from existing blocks according to demand, without the necessity of carefully planning an edition size as demanded by printing from movable type. The equipment that publishers or Formschneider needed was not very bulky, and there is ample evidence that woodblocks travelled far and wide.
Biblia Pauperum was not a title used in the late Middle Ages for this work; it only came into general use after it was introduced in the 18th century by the first student of blockbooks, Karl Heinrich von Heinecken. These picture-text pages were not intended for the instruction of the poor, as has occasionally been stated, but were aimed at the literate and devout who knew their Scriptures well enough to follow the narrative content. The Biblia Pauperum is a typological work by unknown authors, which presents a series of central scenes from the New Testament (antitypes) flanked by Old Testament scenes of prefigurations (types), with portraits of the prophets placed above and below. The concise but important texts are of three kinds: complex verse captions to the pictures, Old Testament prophecies quoted from the Vulgate, and simple lessons explaining the typology.
The dating and localization of a typographical edition equally apply to all its copies; of xylographic editions, however, ideally each impression should be dated and localized individually. This is extremely difficult to do for the 40-leaf Biblia Pauperum. Five closely copied sets of woodblocks can be distinguished, whose impressions were divided into ten editions [or perhaps more properly, states] by W. L. Schreiber almost a century ago. His division has become tradition, but their true chronological sequence cannot be established despite numerous attempts, some quite recent and wholly unconvincing. Different sets of blocks no doubt led concurrent useful lives. (Allan Stevenson did establish from paper evidence a definitive date for the earliest of all extant blockbooks, the Netherlandish first edition of the Apocalypse ca. 1451-52.) The rediscovery of the Ashburnham copy of Schreiber's ed. III of the Latin Biblia Pauperum is an important bibliophile event and its sale by auction represents no doubt one of the very last chances to acquire a complete copy of any blockbook edition.
RARITY: no other complete or substantial copy of this edition remains in private hands. Apparently no more than three copies of any xylographic edition of Biblia Pauperum are now privately owned: the coloured Gotha-Doheny copy of ed. VIII, presently on deposit at the British Library; the lightly coloured Perrins-Northumberland copy (lacking four leaves) of ed. I in the Ritman collection; and the uncoloured Botfield copy of ed. VI at Longleat. Other private copies listed by Schreiber in 1902 have moved into institutional hands: the Six copy of ed. I is perhaps identical with Pierpont Morgan Library 3193, Holford copy of ed. IV (now Libr. of Congress), Pembroke copy of ed. VI (Huntington Libr.), Schreiber's own copy of ed. VII (Haarlem, Municipal Library, with the exception of 5 leaves that escaped before acquisition), Chatsworth copy of ed. VIII (National Libr. of Scotland). See also C. Schneider's "Blockbuch-Kurzzensus" in Gutenberg-Museum exhibition catalogue 1991; in her section of unlocated blockbooks the Vernon copy of ed. X (not IX as stated) is the only one we cannot identify with an institutional copy.
CENSUS: Apart from the present complete copy (1), forgotten since the Ashburnham sale of 1897, more than a dozen other copies of the Latin Biblia Pauperum III survive, four of which are complete (5-6, 8 and 10) and one almost complete (2); one copy is slightly more than half complete (3), having the first nine and final thirteen leaves. Of six remaining copies only the first ten quires (the 20 leaves signed a-v) are extant in each case and they were no doubt issued that way, albeit for reasons, so far unexplained (4, 7, 9, 11-13); one of them (13), a coloured copy, was broken up after 1936. In the 1840s a 31-leaf fragment (14) was broken up and largely sold in the United States. Finally, a single leaf (15) crossed the Atlantic in 1900, which cannot readily be related to any known imperfect copy, and small fragments (16) were discovered about ten years ago in the French department of Nord.
1. England, the copy here offered for sale -- complete
------------
2. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (ex-Archbishop Parker) -- lacking a-b
3. The Hague, Museum van het Boek (ex-Meermanno-Westreenianum) -- lacking k-v and a - g
4. Innsbruck, University Library (ex-Wilten, Premonstratensians) -- without the final ten quires
5. London, British Library (IC. 45a ex-Holkham Hall) -- complete, coloured
6. Manchester, Rylands Library (ex-Spencer) -- complete, 1467 dated binding 7. Munich, Bavarian State Library (ex-Hofbibliothek) -- without final ten quires
8. New York, Morgan Library (ex-Jacques Rosenthal) -- complete
9. Oxford, Bodleian Library (ex-Sykes-Douce) -- without final ten quires
10. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (ex-La Vallière) -- complete
11. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire (ex-Butsch) -- without final ten quires
12. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek -- without final ten quires
-----------------
13. Karl & Faber cat. 65 (1936), no. 18 (ex-Wiblingen-Kremsmünster) -- without final ten quires, coloured, the sheets now dispersed: c-d (M. Breslauer 109/19), m and n-o (Kornfeld & Klipstein 1975-77 sales), p-q (Antiq. Wölfle 53/1), r-s and t-v (Dr. Otto-Schäfer-Stiftung) and others.
14. Payne & Foss (1845-49) -- 31 leaves only, of which a-b and c were sold to the British Museum, Print Room, and 28 leaves were sold for ¨11 5s to the American bookseller Henry Stevens; two of the latter may be identical with sheet i-k at Bloomington, Indiana University, Lilly Library, and further sheets are no doubt preserved in other American Libraries.
15. New York, Morgan Library (ex-Bennett) -- fo. i only.
16. Douai, Bibliothèque municipale -- fragments as described by Barbier
LITERATURE: K.H. von Heinecken, Idée générale d'une collection complète d'estampes ... et sur les premiers livres d'images (Leipzig 1771) p. 308.
S.L. Sotheby, Principia Typographica. The block-books of scripture history (London 1858) I, 50-68 and III, 25-26.
W.L. Schreiber, Manuel de l'amateur de la gravure sur bois au XVe siècle IV (Leipzig 1902) pp. 4-5, 10-89.
A.M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut (London 1935) I, pp. 236, 241.
S. Mertens and C. Schneider (eds.), Blockbücher des Mittelalters. Bilderfolgen als Lektüre (Mainz 1991) pp. 229-310, particularly the contributions by A. Stevenson (ed. C. van Dijk) and A. Henry.
----------------
P. Heitz and W. L. Schreiber (eds.), Biblia Pauperum: Nach dem einzigen Exemplare in 50 Darstellungen (Strassburg 1903).
H. Th. Musper, Die Urausgaben der holländischen Apokalypse und Biblia Pauperum (Munich 1961).
L. Kohút, "Das Blockbuch, insbesondere die Biblia pauperum, ein Vorläufer des illustrierten Buches", in: Beiträge zur Inkunabelkunde 3. Folge, no. 4 (1969), pp. 112-22.
L..Hellinga, "Les livres tabellaires", in: Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas (Brussels 1973) pp. 78-82. R.A. Koch, "New Criteria for dating the Netherlandish Biblia pauperum blockbook", in: Studies in honor of Millard Meiss (New York 1977) pp. 283-89.
A. Henry, Biblia Pauperum. A facsimile and edition (Aldershot 1987).
-------------
A. W. Pollard (ed.), Catalogue of Books printed in the XVth Century now in the British Museum (London 1908, lith. reprint 1963) p. 5.
M. von Arnim, Katalog der Bibliothek Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt (Stuttgart 1984) I, p. 72.
F. Barbier, "Une édition xylographique à la Bibliothèque municipale de Douai", in: Revue française d'histoire du livre 51, new ser., no. 34 (1982), pp. 187-88.
U. Baurmeister and others. Bibliothèque nationale. Catalogue des incunables. Tome I, Fasc. 1: Xylographes et A (Paris 1992) BB-3.
Chancery 2° (252/266 x 187/190mm without margins). COLLATION: [1-202], 40 leaves signed a-v, a - v . The sheets printed on the inner side only, in pale brown occasionally greyish water-based ink, by a rubbing process, from twenty double-page woodblocks (a-b ... t - v ), the outer sides blank. Each woodcut page comprising three pictures, four portraits, and Latin text.
PAPER: a single stock, probably from a Piedmont mill, the watermark pair of a hand surmounted with a star not recorded in Briquet but belonging to his group 11088-90 and 11092-93, whose use is found from Sicily to Zeeland over a fifty-year period from the 1430s to the 1480s. This paper stock apparently not recorded in any other surviving impression of the blockbook Biblia Pauperum.
CONDITION: the bifolia now divided and each leaf remargined with Whatman paper affecting the outermost frame (replaced in manuscript with a black and red-ruled frame); a few small wormholes repaired very slightly affecting text or illustration in about twelve leaves; minor defects, mainly marginal, repaired in eight leaves and repairs along the extreme outer and/or top edges of thirteen other leaves affecting woodcut increasingly towards the end; printed surface rubbed in small central portions of fos. 1, 17-19, 21 and 26, as well as elsewhere on five other pages; defect in centre of fo. 8 restored with missing lines of illustration replaced in manuscript; crease across fos. 33-36 flattened when the leaves were pressed for rebinding; a few very minor stains; uneven inking of lower caption in fo. 35, but by whatever frottage they were produced the impressions of the double-page woodcuts have fine tone and are remarkably strong, only fo. 40 and perhaps one or two other pages showing a few lines or letters strengthened in pen-and-ink (a much more common occurrence in most other copies); although the leaves were rebound in the correct order, the codex opens with the woodcut on fo. 1 as a right-hand page instead of on the left, so that as a result the facing pages are presently not arranged as they were printed from the double-page blocks. The listing of these defects is meticulous, perhaps obscuring the fact that this extremely rare blockbook is generally in very good condition.
BINDING: English gold-tooled blue straight-grained morocco of ca. 1790, sides panelled with multiple fillets, a Greek-key outer border with a small sunburst tool in the corners, the Carysfort arms added in the centre of the front cover, flat spine decorated in compartments with foliate ornament and pointillé tooling, two roll-tooled borders on turn-ins, purple watered-silk liners, gilt edges. (Binding somewhat faded and rubbed in places.)
PROVENANCE: Jean-Baptiste Pâris de Meyzieu (not in the French edition of his 1791 London sale catalogue, but lot 4 bis in the English version, which suggests that it was a last-minute insertion by the auctioneer-bookseller James Edwards and that perhaps it was his own property rather than part of the Pâris collection, thus explaining the English binding, sold at ¨51 to); Ralph Willett of Merly, Dorset (lot 296 in his London sale of 7th December 1813, ¨257 5s); P. A. Hanrott (his inscription on provenance "The Paris Copy", condition "very fine and complete", Heinecken reference, date "A.D. (circa) 1430" and rarity "excessively rare", 1833 London sale, ¨36 15s); 4th Earl of Ashburnham (27th June 1897 Sotheby sale, lot 419, via Quaritch to); William, Earl of Carysfort (bookplate); by descent to the present owner.
In the third quarter of the fifteenth century the pictures and text of the so-called Biblia Pauperum, current in manuscript since before 1300, were modified for publication in both typographical and xylographic (or blockbook) editions. Albrecht Pfister printed one Latin and two German-language editions in 36-line Bible type, illustrated with woodcuts, Bamberg: ca. 1462-63 (GW 4325-27). In the same decade a larger number of xylographic editions appeared in the Northern and/or Southern Low Countries and Germany, which in the past have been dated as early as 1425 and as late as 1475. Blockbooks are codices produced entirely from woodblocks; the earliest editions were not printed with black oil-based ink in a press such as Gutenberg had invented, but impressions of the woodcut pages were obtained in thin watery ink by rubbing, perhaps with a flat spatula-like instrument. The technique was in rare cases combined with manuscript (chiro-xylography) or typography (notably several Dutch semi-blockbook editions of Speculum Humanae Salvationis). Blockbooks were not always illustrated (e.g. Donatus), but the technique was particularly suited to the multiplication of works that combined pictures and text, as is most integrally the case with the Biblia Pauperum. Short popular works for which there was a steady market, such as Latin grammars for students, illustrated meditative texts for priests, almanacs for everybody, could be cheaply and simply republished from existing blocks according to demand, without the necessity of carefully planning an edition size as demanded by printing from movable type. The equipment that publishers or Formschneider needed was not very bulky, and there is ample evidence that woodblocks travelled far and wide.
Biblia Pauperum was not a title used in the late Middle Ages for this work; it only came into general use after it was introduced in the 18th century by the first student of blockbooks, Karl Heinrich von Heinecken. These picture-text pages were not intended for the instruction of the poor, as has occasionally been stated, but were aimed at the literate and devout who knew their Scriptures well enough to follow the narrative content. The Biblia Pauperum is a typological work by unknown authors, which presents a series of central scenes from the New Testament (antitypes) flanked by Old Testament scenes of prefigurations (types), with portraits of the prophets placed above and below. The concise but important texts are of three kinds: complex verse captions to the pictures, Old Testament prophecies quoted from the Vulgate, and simple lessons explaining the typology.
The dating and localization of a typographical edition equally apply to all its copies; of xylographic editions, however, ideally each impression should be dated and localized individually. This is extremely difficult to do for the 40-leaf Biblia Pauperum. Five closely copied sets of woodblocks can be distinguished, whose impressions were divided into ten editions [or perhaps more properly, states] by W. L. Schreiber almost a century ago. His division has become tradition, but their true chronological sequence cannot be established despite numerous attempts, some quite recent and wholly unconvincing. Different sets of blocks no doubt led concurrent useful lives. (Allan Stevenson did establish from paper evidence a definitive date for the earliest of all extant blockbooks, the Netherlandish first edition of the Apocalypse ca. 1451-52.) The rediscovery of the Ashburnham copy of Schreiber's ed. III of the Latin Biblia Pauperum is an important bibliophile event and its sale by auction represents no doubt one of the very last chances to acquire a complete copy of any blockbook edition.
RARITY: no other complete or substantial copy of this edition remains in private hands. Apparently no more than three copies of any xylographic edition of Biblia Pauperum are now privately owned: the coloured Gotha-Doheny copy of ed. VIII, presently on deposit at the British Library; the lightly coloured Perrins-Northumberland copy (lacking four leaves) of ed. I in the Ritman collection; and the uncoloured Botfield copy of ed. VI at Longleat. Other private copies listed by Schreiber in 1902 have moved into institutional hands: the Six copy of ed. I is perhaps identical with Pierpont Morgan Library 3193, Holford copy of ed. IV (now Libr. of Congress), Pembroke copy of ed. VI (Huntington Libr.), Schreiber's own copy of ed. VII (Haarlem, Municipal Library, with the exception of 5 leaves that escaped before acquisition), Chatsworth copy of ed. VIII (National Libr. of Scotland). See also C. Schneider's "Blockbuch-Kurzzensus" in Gutenberg-Museum exhibition catalogue 1991; in her section of unlocated blockbooks the Vernon copy of ed. X (not IX as stated) is the only one we cannot identify with an institutional copy.
CENSUS: Apart from the present complete copy (1), forgotten since the Ashburnham sale of 1897, more than a dozen other copies of the Latin Biblia Pauperum III survive, four of which are complete (5-6, 8 and 10) and one almost complete (2); one copy is slightly more than half complete (3), having the first nine and final thirteen leaves. Of six remaining copies only the first ten quires (the 20 leaves signed a-v) are extant in each case and they were no doubt issued that way, albeit for reasons, so far unexplained (4, 7, 9, 11-13); one of them (13), a coloured copy, was broken up after 1936. In the 1840s a 31-leaf fragment (14) was broken up and largely sold in the United States. Finally, a single leaf (15) crossed the Atlantic in 1900, which cannot readily be related to any known imperfect copy, and small fragments (16) were discovered about ten years ago in the French department of Nord.
1. England, the copy here offered for sale -- complete
------------
2. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (ex-Archbishop Parker) -- lacking a-b
3. The Hague, Museum van het Boek (ex-Meermanno-Westreenianum) -- lacking k-v and a - g
4. Innsbruck, University Library (ex-Wilten, Premonstratensians) -- without the final ten quires
5. London, British Library (IC. 45a ex-Holkham Hall) -- complete, coloured
6. Manchester, Rylands Library (ex-Spencer) -- complete, 1467 dated binding 7. Munich, Bavarian State Library (ex-Hofbibliothek) -- without final ten quires
8. New York, Morgan Library (ex-Jacques Rosenthal) -- complete
9. Oxford, Bodleian Library (ex-Sykes-Douce) -- without final ten quires
10. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (ex-La Vallière) -- complete
11. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire (ex-Butsch) -- without final ten quires
12. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek -- without final ten quires
-----------------
13. Karl & Faber cat. 65 (1936), no. 18 (ex-Wiblingen-Kremsmünster) -- without final ten quires, coloured, the sheets now dispersed: c-d (M. Breslauer 109/19), m and n-o (Kornfeld & Klipstein 1975-77 sales), p-q (Antiq. Wölfle 53/1), r-s and t-v (Dr. Otto-Schäfer-Stiftung) and others.
14. Payne & Foss (1845-49) -- 31 leaves only, of which a-b and c were sold to the British Museum, Print Room, and 28 leaves were sold for ¨11 5s to the American bookseller Henry Stevens; two of the latter may be identical with sheet i-k at Bloomington, Indiana University, Lilly Library, and further sheets are no doubt preserved in other American Libraries.
15. New York, Morgan Library (ex-Bennett) -- fo. i only.
16. Douai, Bibliothèque municipale -- fragments as described by Barbier
LITERATURE: K.H. von Heinecken, Idée générale d'une collection complète d'estampes ... et sur les premiers livres d'images (Leipzig 1771) p. 308.
S.L. Sotheby, Principia Typographica. The block-books of scripture history (London 1858) I, 50-68 and III, 25-26.
W.L. Schreiber, Manuel de l'amateur de la gravure sur bois au XVe siècle IV (Leipzig 1902) pp. 4-5, 10-89.
A.M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut (London 1935) I, pp. 236, 241.
S. Mertens and C. Schneider (eds.), Blockbücher des Mittelalters. Bilderfolgen als Lektüre (Mainz 1991) pp. 229-310, particularly the contributions by A. Stevenson (ed. C. van Dijk) and A. Henry.
----------------
P. Heitz and W. L. Schreiber (eds.), Biblia Pauperum: Nach dem einzigen Exemplare in 50 Darstellungen (Strassburg 1903).
H. Th. Musper, Die Urausgaben der holländischen Apokalypse und Biblia Pauperum (Munich 1961).
L. Kohút, "Das Blockbuch, insbesondere die Biblia pauperum, ein Vorläufer des illustrierten Buches", in: Beiträge zur Inkunabelkunde 3. Folge, no. 4 (1969), pp. 112-22.
L..Hellinga, "Les livres tabellaires", in: Le cinquième centenaire de l'imprimerie dans les anciens Pays-Bas (Brussels 1973) pp. 78-82. R.A. Koch, "New Criteria for dating the Netherlandish Biblia pauperum blockbook", in: Studies in honor of Millard Meiss (New York 1977) pp. 283-89.
A. Henry, Biblia Pauperum. A facsimile and edition (Aldershot 1987).
-------------
A. W. Pollard (ed.), Catalogue of Books printed in the XVth Century now in the British Museum (London 1908, lith. reprint 1963) p. 5.
M. von Arnim, Katalog der Bibliothek Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt (Stuttgart 1984) I, p. 72.
F. Barbier, "Une édition xylographique à la Bibliothèque municipale de Douai", in: Revue française d'histoire du livre 51, new ser., no. 34 (1982), pp. 187-88.
U. Baurmeister and others. Bibliothèque nationale. Catalogue des incunables. Tome I, Fasc. 1: Xylographes et A (Paris 1992) BB-3.