The great letter “B” in Fust and Schöffer’s _Mainz Psalter_, issued in 1457, is as fine as anything of its kind that has ever been done. It is printed from two wood blocks which fit into each other, and which were inked alternately either red or blue, and then printed together with the text. A slow process but thoroughly effective. The initial letters throughout this book seem to have been touched up in places by hand, especially in the long scrolls which meander up and down the margins of the pages. The earliest known book illustration cut on wood is a beautiful outline sketch of the Goddess of Mercy. It is full page and illustrates a chapter from a Chinese version of the Saddharmapundarika Sutra, and was printed in 1331, nearly a hundred years before the earliest European print from a wood block, the St. Christopher, of 1423, which moreover was not a book illustration. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean wood cuts are always in outline, thickened here and there, but quite different in character and far better in drawing and execution than early European work of the same sort. Most of the blocks from which these prints are made are of soft wood, not box, and are cut with a short knife of peculiar form set in a handle. The drawings are made on thin paper and stuck downwards on the blocks; then the knife is carefully run along the edges of the various lines, cutting outwards, the interlinear spaces being cut away with a gouge and hammer. The wood cutting was often done by women. The method of work is probably the same as was used in Europe in the case of early blocks. Besides the design block, always printed in dark neutral tint or black, during the eighteenth and succeeding centuries, the Chinese and Japanese cut accessory blocks which were inked in various colours. The registering of the various colour blocks was managed either by pegs or notches, and the colours were mixed with water or rice paste. Most of the European colour processes of printing require oil colours, but water colours on the Japanese principle have been used with admirable effect in some of the illustrations to Henry Shaw’s books on Mediæval Dresses and Decorative Arts, and notably by Edmund Evans and his successors in more recent times. From the earliest illustration, mentioned above, until the present day, the style of Chinese and Japanese wood illustrations has not altered. There have been several engravers of great skill in both countries, but I think the Japanese colour prints are best known to us. The blocks are frequently signed with the names of the designers, particularly in later times, and many names are already well known to collectors. In the seventeenth century Korin was one of the best of the Japanese illustrators; in the eighteenth century there is admirable work signed by Hokusai and Hiroshige, and among the many skilled designers of the nineteenth century the work of Kitigawa Utamaro is perhaps the best known.