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This is the most famous and the most creditable specimen of the early block-book. 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.

The author of the Bible of the Poor is unknown, but the designer of the illustrations was not the writer of the texts that explained the designs. There are frequent incongruities between the words and the pictures, which fully show that the author did not always understand the intent of the artist. It is probable that the illustrations were made first, and that, in the beginning, the Bible of the Poor was a book of pictures only. Some German antiquarians say that the book, in its