Graphic Devotions: Late Medieval European Blockbooks

Preview: written before the show opened

On every page of a blockbook, the words and the picture were cut into the same block of wood and printed together. They are often called "medieval graphic novels", and they were the first print-on-demand books in the West. They appeared around 1450 and had largely died out by 1480.

For those thirty years they competed with handwritten manuscripts and with books set in movable type, and lost: carving a page in wood was slower than setting it. The centrepiece is an Ars moriendi, a guide to dying well, printed in the Netherlands around 1467 to 1469. Pierpont Morgan bought nine of its 24 leaves in 1902, and the museum bought the other fifteen from a private collection in 2022, so you are looking at the only known complete copy.

The Morgan holds the largest blockbook collection in the United States, and curator John McQuillen's catalogue is a census of every blockbook or fragment in US collections. The Morgan stays open until 8pm on Fridays.