It was the Germans who first practised card-making as a trade, and as early as 1418 the name of a _kartenmacher_, or card-maker, occurs in the burgess-books of Augsburg. In the town-books of Nuremburg, the designation _formschneider_, or figure-cutter, is found in 1449; and we may presume that block books--that is, books each page of which was cut on a single block--were introduced about this time. These books were on religious subjects, and were intended, perhaps, by the monks as a kind of counterbalance against the playing-cards; "thus endeavouring to supply a remedy for the evil, and extracting from the serpent a cure for his bite." The earliest woodcut known--one of St. Christopher--bears the date of 1432, and was found in a convent situated within about fifty miles of the city of Augsburg--the convent of Buxheim, near Memmingen. It was pasted on the inside of the right hand cover of a manuscript entitled _Laus Virginis_, and measures eleven and a quarter inches in height, by eight and one-eighth inches in width. The following description of it by Jackson is interesting:-- "To the left of the engraving the artist has introduced, with a noble disregard of perspective, what Bewick would have called a 'bit of nature.' In the foreground a figure is seen driving an ass loaded with a sack towards a water-mill; while by a steep path a figure, perhaps intended for the miller, is seen carrying a full sack from the back-door of the mill towards a cottage. To the right is seen a hermit--known by the bell over the entrance to his dwelling--holding a large lantern to direct St. Christopher as he crosses the stream. The couplet at the foot of the cut,-- 'Cristofori faciem die quacunque tueris, Illa nempe die morte mala non morieris,' may be translated as follows,-- Each day that thou the image of St. Christopher shall see, That day no frightful form of death shall chance to fall on thee. These lines allude to a superstition, once popular in all Catholic countries, that on the day they saw a figure or image of St. Christopher, they would be safe from a violent death, or from death unabsolved and unconfessed."