ognized block-books, among which are the Apocalypse, and the
_Biblia Pauperum_ (or _Poor Man's Bible_), supposed to have been printed
at Haarlem by Laurence Koster, between 1420 and 1430; I say supposed,
because we have no positive evidence either of the person, place, or
date; and Erasmus, who was born at Rotterdam in 1467, and always ready
to advance the honor of his country, is silent on the subject. We rely
chiefly upon the testimony of Ulric Zell, an eminent printer of Cologne,
who is quoted in the _Cologne Chronicle_ of 1499, and Hadrian Junius, a
Dutch historian of repute, who wrote in the next century. Both agree in
ascribing the invention of book-printing from wooden blocks, as well as
the first germ of movable wood and metallic type printing, to Haarlem;
and Junius adds the name of Laurence Koster. His surname of Koster is
derived from his office, which was that of custodian, sexton, or warden
of the Cathedral Church of Haarlem. The story told of the accident by
which the discovery was made is as follows:

Koster, as he was one day walking in a wood adjoining the city, about the
year 1420, cut some letters on the bark of a beech tree, from which he
took impressions on paper for the amusement of his brother-in-law's
children. The idea then struck him of enlarging their application;
and, being a man of an ingenious turn, he invented a thicker and more
tenacious ink than was in common use, which blotted, and began to print
figures from wooden tablets or blocks, to which he added several lines of
letters, first solid, and then separate or movable. These wooden types
are said to have been fastened together with string.

One thing seems pretty clear, which is, that, whether or not Koster was
the printer, the first block-books were produced somewhere in Holland, as
several are in Dutch, a language seldom, if ever, printed out of its own
country. They were generally printed in light-brown ink, like a sepia
drawing, which, I think, was adopted with a view to their being
colored--a condition in which we find the greater part of them. When
these prints were colored they presented very much the appearance of the
Low Country stained-glass windows.

Block-books continued to be printed and reprinted, first in Holland and
afterward in Germany, with considerable activity, for twenty or thirty
years, during which period we had several editions of the _Biblia
Pauperum_, the _Ars Moriendi_ (or _Art of Dying),_ the _Speculum Huma