‘Novem printe lignee ad imprimendas ymagines cum quatuordecim aliis lapideis printis.’ Thus, these editions do not necessarily follow one another; some may have been produced side by side by different cutters, others within the interval of a few months, but by the same man. Their date is another difficult point. The copies of the _Biblia Pauperum_, _Apocalypse_, and _Ars Moriendi_, which belonged to Mr. Horn, were in their original binding, and it was stamped with a date. The books were separated and the binding destroyed. Mr. Horn asserted from memory that the first three figures of the date were certainly 142, and the last probably an 8. Mr. Conway very justly points out that the resemblance of a 5 of that date to our 2 was very strong, and that Mr. Horn’s memory may have deceived him. It will be noticed in examining block-books generally, that the letterpress in the majority of the later examples is cut in imitation of handwriting, and not of the square church hand from which printing types and the letterpress of the earlier block-books were copied. The reason of this probably is, that it was found useless to try to compete with the books printed from movable type in regularity and neatness. To do so would have involved a much greater expenditure of trouble by the woodcutter and designer. The illustrations were the important part of the book, and the letterpress was put in with as little trouble as possible. The sheets on which the early block-books were printed were not quired, _i.e._ placed one inside the other to form a quire or gathering, as was done in ordinary printed books, but followed each other singly. In many of the books we find signatures, each sheet being signed with a letter of the alphabet as a guide to the binder in arranging them. Among the dated block-books may be mentioned an edition of the _Endkrist_, dated 1472, produced at Nuremberg; an edition of the _Ars Moriendi_ cut by Hans Sporer in 1473; and another of about the same period cut by Ludwig zu Ulm. Of the _Biblia Pauperum_ there are three dated editions known, one of 1470 and two of 1471. A copy of the _De generatione Christi_ has the following full colophon:— ‘Johannes Eysenhut impressor, anno ab incarnationis dominice Mº quadringentesimo septuagesimo Iº.’ Hans Sporer of Nuremberg produced an edition of the _Biblia Pauperum_ in 1475, and Chatto speaks of another of the same year without a name, but containing as a mark a shield with a spur upon it, which he supposes to stand for the name Sporer. Many of these later books were not printed in distemper on one side of the paper only, but on both sides and in printer’s ink, showing that the use of the printing press was known to those who produced them. [Illustration: PAGE 3 OF THE ‘MIRABILIA ROMÆ’]