Graphic Devotions

European blockbooks—heavily illustrated books printed from woodblocks that contained both text and image—represent a brief but crucial experiment in book production, emerging alongside early typographic printing. Although short lived as a book medium, blockbooks illuminate the expanding demand for books and the experimental practices that shaped the inclusion of printed books into European manuscript culture during the second half of the fifteenth century.

This volume draws on the author’s recent discoveries in production and copy history to provide both a synthetic study of the medium and the first comprehensive descriptive census of extant blockbooks in US collections. Across four chapters, it examines how blockbooks were produced, circulated, and read both by early readers and by later collectors and demonstrates that they cannot be understood simply as reproductions of manuscripts or precursors to typographic books. Grounded in extensive firsthand examination of surviving copies, it integrates bibliographical, codicological, and material analyses, addressing printing techniques, bifolia production, relationships to manuscript and print traditions, and the physical materials of manufacture, including papers, inks, and pigments.

At the heart of the book is its descriptive census, which records every known blockbook or fragment held in US public and private collections, noting physical characteristics, provenance, and dispersed leaves to aid in reconstructing original copies. By placing material evidence at the center of inquiry, the book establishes a new foundation for blockbook studies. It will be indispensable for scholars and students of book history, bibliography, medieval studies, art history, and the history of printing.