The neglect of the block-books by early librarians seems almost justifiable when we consider their great inferiority to the typographic books that followed them. From a literary point of view, they were of no importance as works of instruction or authority. They were published during the fifteenth century, but they really belong to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during which period most of them were composed. The legends that explain their illustrations were written in Latin, but they are adapted to readers in a child-like state of development. It is not strange that they should have been put aside by the world when it had outgrown them. Childish as these books are, they are of high value to those who wish to note the growth of printing. They indicate the attainments of their authors and readers, and the artistic abilities of their designers and engravers. They show the quality of the paper, ink, and workmanship of the period. They prove that the art of printing from blocks was practised by many persons during the second and third quarters of the fifteenth century. [p198] [Illustration: Fac-simile of the Last Page of the Bible of the Poor.] THE BIBLIA PAUPERUM, OR BIBLE OF THE POOR. This is the most famous and the most creditable specimen of the early block-book.[105] The title, _Bible of the Poor_, seems to have been used at an early period to distinguish it from the Bible proper, a fair manuscript copy of which was sold in France, in the year 1460, for five hundred crowns of gold. The Bible proper, as then made, in two or more stout folio volumes of fine vellum, was the Bible of the rich; its epitome, in the shape of the book of forty pages of engravings, about to be described, was the Bible of the poor.