Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 46241-h.htm or 46241-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46241/46241-h/46241-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46241/46241-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/somenotesonearly00morrrich SOME NOTES ON EARLY WOODCUT BOOKS, WITH A CHAPTER ON ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS, by WILLIAM MORRIS Copyright, 1902 By H. M. O'Kane [Illustration: From Terence's Eunuchus, Ulm, Conrad Dinckmut, 1486] Notes on Woodcut Books ON THE ARTISTIC QUALITIES OF THE WOODCUT BOOKS OF ULM AND AUGSBURG IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. The invention of printing books, and the use of wood-blocks for book ornament in place of hand-painting, though it belongs to the period of the degradation of mediæval art, gave an opportunity to the Germans to regain the place which they had lost in the art of book decoration during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This opportunity they took with vigour and success, and by means of it put forth works which showed the best and most essential qualities of their race. Unhappily, even at the time of their first woodcut book, the beginning of the end was on them; about thirty years afterwards they received the Renaissance with singular eagerness and rapidity, and became, from the artistic point of view, a nation of rhetorical pedants. An exception must be made, however, as to Albert Dürer; for, though his method was infected by the Renaissance, his matchless imagination and intellect made him thoroughly Gothic in spirit. Amongst the printing localities of Germany the two neighbouring cities of Ulm and Augsburg developed a school of woodcut book ornament second to none as to character, and, I think, more numerously represented than any other. I am obliged to link the two cities, because the early school at least is common to both; but the ornamented works produced by Ulm are but few compared with the prolific birth of Augsburg.