Mr. Jackson observes that there cannot be a doubt that the principle on which wood engraving is founded—that of taking impressions on paper or parchment, with ink, from prominent lines—was known and practised in attesting documents in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Towards the end of the fourteenth, or about the beginning of the fifteenth century, he says, there seems reason to believe that this principle was adopted by the German card-makers for the purpose of marking the outlines of the figures on their cards, which they afterwards coloured by the practice called stencilling.
It was the Germans who first practised card-making as a trade, and as early as 1418 the name of a kartenmacher, or card-maker, occurs in the burgess-books of Augsburg. In the town-books of Nuremburg, the designation formschneider, or figure-cutter, is found in 1449; and we may presume that block books—that is, books each page of which was cut on a single block—were introduced about this time. These books were on religious subjects, and were intended, perhaps, by the monks as a kind of counterbalance against the playing-cards; "thus endeavouring to supply a remedy for the evil, and extracting from the serpent a cure for his bite."
The earliest woodcut known—one of St. Christopher—bears the date of 1432, and was found in a convent situated within about fifty miles of the city of Augsburg—the convent of Buxheim, near Memmingen. It was pasted on the inside of the right hand cover of a manuscript entitled Laus Virginis, and measures eleven and a quarter inches in height, by eight and one-eighth inches in width.
The following description of it by Jackson is interesting:—
"To the left of the engraving the artist has introduced, with a noble disregard of perspective, what Bewick would have called a 'bit of nature.' In the foreground a figure is seen driving an ass loaded with a sack towards a water-mill; while by a steep path a figure, perhaps intended for the miller, is seen carrying a full sack from the back-door of the mill towards a cottage. To the right is seen a hermit—known by the bell over the entrance to his dwelling—holding a large lantern to direct St. Christopher as he crosses the stream. The couplet at the foot of the cut,—
'Cristofori faciem die quacunque tueris,
Illa nempe die morte mala non morieris,'
may be translated as follows,—
Each day that thou the image of St. Christopher shall see,
That day no frightful form of death shall chance to fall on thee.
These lines allude to a superstition, once popular in all Catholic countries, that on the day they saw a figure or image of St. Christopher, they would be safe from a violent death, or from death unabsolved and unconfessed."
Passing over some other woodcuts of great antiquity, in all of which the figures are accompanied by engraved letters, we come to the block books proper. Of these, the most famous are called, the Apocalypsis, seu Historia Sancti Johannis (the "Apocalypse, or History of St. John"); the Historia Virginis ex Cantico Canticorum ("Story of the Virgin, from the Song of Songs"); and the Biblia Pauperum ("Bible of the Poor"). The first is a history, pictorial and literal, of the life and revelations of St. John the Evangelist, partly derived from the book of Revelation, and partly from ecclesiastical tradition. The second is a similar biography of the Virgin Mary, as it is supposed to be typified in the Song of Solomon; and the third consists of subjects representing many of the most important passages in the Old and New Testaments, with texts to illustrate the subject, or clinch the lesson of duty it may shadow forth.