Late Medieval European Blockbooks

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.

“This important volume restores blockbooks to their rightful place as a subject of serious scholarly inquiry alongside manuscripts and early printed books. Every scholar interested in the history of the book, whether in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, or beyond, and every library, especially reference and research libraries, will want a copy of McQuillen’s comprehensive catalogue, which further includes four chapters about the history of blockbooks, which were made alongside and sometimes after books produced with moveable type.”—Martha Westcott Driver, author of The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England

John T. McQuillen is Associate Curator of Printed Books & Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum. For the Morgan, he has curated or cocurated the exhibitions William Caxton and the Birth of English Printing (2015), Word and Image: Martin Luther’s Reformation (2017), Bound for Versailles: The Jayne Wrightsman Bookbindings Collection (2021–22), Holbein: Capturing Character (with the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2021–22), and Seeds of Knowledge: Early Modern Illustrated Herbals (2023–24). He was the organizing curator for the landmark Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth (2019), a loan exhibition from the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

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