One thing seems pretty clear, which is, that, whether or not Koster was
the printer, the first block-books were produced somewhere in Holland, as
several are in Dutch, a language seldom, if ever, printed out of its own
country. They were generally printed in light-brown ink, like a sepia
drawing, which, I think, was adopted with a view to their being
colored--a condition in which we find the greater part of them. When
these prints were colored they presented very much the appearance of the
Low Country stained-glass windows.

Block-books continued to be printed and reprinted, first in Holland and
afterward in Germany, with considerable activity, for twenty or thirty
years, during which period we had several editions of the _Biblia
Pauperum_, the _Ars Moriendi_ (or _Art of Dying),_ the _Speculum Humanae
Salvationis_, and many others, chiefly devoted to the promulgation of
scripture history. The earliest ones are printed, or rather transferred
by friction--and therefore on one side only of the paper--entirely from
solid blocks; later on, some portions were printed with movable types of
wood; and at last the letter-press was entirely of movable metal types.
Junius says that Koster by degrees exchanged his wooden types for leaden
ones, and these for pewter; and I will add that it is not unlikely they
may have been cast in lead or pewter plates from the wooden blocks, as
metal-casting was well understood at the time.

The pretensions of Haarlem and Koster have for more than a century been a
matter of fierce controversy; and there have been upward of one hundred
and fifty volumes written for or against, without any approach to a
satisfactory decision. This one thing is certain, that, whether or not we
owe the first idea of movable type to Laurence Koster or to Haarlem, we
do not owe to the period any very marked use of it; that was reserved for