It is probable that most of the single sheets and short tracts, printed from wood-blocks, preserved in the libraries of Germany, were printed between 1440 and 1480. Books consisting of two or more sheets printed from wood-blocks are of rare occurrence with a date subsequent to 1480. Although about that period the wood engravers appear to have resigned the printing of books entirely to typographers, yet for several years afterwards they continued to print broadsides from blocks of wood; and until about 1500 they continued to compete with the press for the printing of “Wand-Kalendars,” or sheet Almanacks to be hung up against a wall. Several copies of such Almanacks, engraved between 1470 and 1500, are preserved in libraries on the Continent that are rich in specimens of early block-printing. But even this branch of their business the wood engravers were at length obliged to abandon; and at the end of the fifteenth century the practice of printing pages of text from engraved wood-blocks may be considered as almost extinct in Germany. It probably began with a single sheet, and with a single sheet it ended; and its origin, perfection, decline, and extinction are comprised within a century. 1430 may mark its origin; 1450 its perfection; 1460 the commencement of its decline; and 1500 its fall. In an assemblage of wood engravings printed at Gotha between 1808 and 1816,[IV-65] from old blocks collected by the Baron Von Derschau, there are several to which the editor, Zacharias Becker, assigns an earlier date than the year 1500. It is not unlikely that two or three of those in his oldest class, A, may have been executed previous to that period; but there are others in which bad drawing and rude engraving have been mistaken for indubitable proofs of antiquity. There are also two or three in the same class which I strongly suspect to be modern forgeries. It would appear from a circumstance mentioned in Dr. Dibdin’s Bibliographical Tour,[IV-66] and referred to at page 236 of the present work, that the Baron was a person from whose collection copper-plate engravings of questionable date had proceeded as well as wood-blocks. The following is a reduced copy of one of those suspicious blocks, but which the editor considers to be of an earlier date than the St. Christopher in the collection of Earl Spencer. I am however of opinion that it is of comparatively modern manufacture. [Footnote IV-65: The title of this work is: “Holzschnitte alter Deutscher Meister in den Original-Platten gesammelt von Hans Albrecht Von Derschau. Als ein Beytrag zur Kunstgeschichte herausgegeben, und mit einer Abhandlung über die Holzschneidekunst begleitet, von Rudolph Zacharias Becker.” It is in large folio, with the text in German and French. The first part was published at Gotha in 1808; the second in 1810; and the third in 1816.] [Footnote IV-66: Vol. iii. p. 445, edit. 1829.] [Illustration]