Exhibit Tour of The Morgan’s “Graphic Devotions: Late Medieval European Blockbooks”
Join BSA for a guided tour—led by the curator, BSA President John McQuillen—of The Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition, Graphic Devotions: Late Medieval European Blockbooks.
Registration is required and attendance is limited to 15 participants.
About The Exhibit ↑
Blockbooks, now often referred to as “medieval graphic novels,” were highly illustrated books printed entirely from woodcuts (text and image together). As such, they were the first print-on-demand books in the West. While some works maintained texts and imagery popular from manuscript tradition, block cutters and printers also produced new and innovative texts specifically designed for the medium. Ultimately, the cumbersome production process of woodcut-book printing was surpassed by the greater capabilities of typographic printing that integrated woodcuts, and the blockbook genre had largely died out by 1480. This thirty-year span, however, reveals a critical moment in European book history as the increasing demand for books led to inventions and experimentation in book production.
The Morgan holds the largest collection of blockbooks in the United States. A highlight of this exhibition will be the Ars moriendi blockbook, a rare copy printed in the Netherlands about 1467–69. In 2022, the Morgan acquired fifteen leaves of this blockbook that had been held in a private collection. Remarkably, the Morgan already possessed the remaining nine leaves—purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1902. This acquisition reunites the two parts, forming the only known complete copy of this monument to early European printing.