For 120 years, the Morgan held the end of a book whose beginning was elsewhere.
Nine leaves of an Ars moriendi blockbook arrived with the Bennett collection in 1902. In May 2022, the Morgan Library & Museum acquired fifteen more—the missing beginning of that same copy. Together, the two groups account for all 24 leaves. Each leaf has a front and a back, so 24 leaves is not the same as 24 pages. The Morgan’s two catalog records identify the older group as leaves 16–24 and the newer acquisition as leaves 1–15.
The arithmetic is satisfying. The more interesting question is how anyone knew these belonged to one particular book.
The clues belonged to the copy
Two fragments can carry the same title without ever having shared a binding. Even matching an edition—the particular production version of a work—doesn’t establish that loose leaves came from the same physical copy. A printer could make more than one.
John McQuillen, associate curator of printed books and bindings at the Morgan, explains the recognition in his illustrated 2022 acquisition account. He identified two telling consistencies across the groups: the partial coloring of the pictures and older Roman numeral numbering in their upper corners.
The specialist term for numbering leaves is foliation. Think of what those numbers record: someone keeping track of the sequence in an actual book. The blocks printed the words and pictures shared by copies of this edition. The patchy hand coloring and old leaf numbers aren’t part of what the blocks printed. Their consistency across both groups points to a shared history in one book. McQuillen says these features indicated that the two fragments had once formed a single copy.
That distinction makes the reunion more interesting than a collector filling gaps with whichever leaves became available. The Morgan had recovered the missing portion of its own incomplete book.
The older nine leaves came through Richard Bennett’s collection. The fifteen acquired in 2022 had previously belonged to the Schönborn collection in Germany and later a private collection in Belgium. The groups had separated by 1900, though exactly when and why remain unknown. The fifteen newer leaves have an old calfskin binding bearing the Schönborn family’s arms. The older nine are kept loose in a red cloth portfolio. They are together in the collection, though they aren’t in one binding.
A book for facing death
Ars moriendi means “the art of dying.” The title can sound remote until you understand the book’s concern: how a Christian should face the temptations surrounding death.
In McQuillen’s account, demons tempt a dying person toward failures including despair, impatience and avarice, while saints and angels offer consolation and support. Avarice means greed; vainglory, another temptation in the work, means excessive pride in oneself. The struggle is religious, concerned with sin and salvation. Its images give visible form to that struggle, with temptation answered by spiritual help. McQuillen’s explanation includes illustrations from both groups of leaves.
The manufacturing method matters because the words were pictures of a kind, too. In this blockbook, the text as well as the images was carved into woodblocks and printed from them. A handwritten manuscript required writing the text by hand; movable-type printing assembled text from separate reusable letters. Here, the letters themselves were cut into the wooden printing surface. The Morgan’s exhibition overview places these methods alongside one another in fifteenth-century Europe.
That coexistence is worth pausing over. It is tempting to arrange old technologies in a neat procession, each waiting to be replaced by the next. European blockbooks were a choice within a world that also had manuscripts and movable-type books. The Morgan’s description of its exhibition catalog explicitly treats them as a medium with its own history, rather than merely a steppingstone to typography.
Complete, with questions still open
This copy was printed around 1466–69, in the Netherlands or the Lower Rhine region.
The Morgan identifies the reunited material as the only complete surviving copy of edition IIA, meaning the first state of the second edition. A state distinguishes a version within an edition; the catalog notes that certain woodblocks were recut for state B. Other Ars moriendi blockbooks survive. What’s unique here is a complete copy of this version: according to McQuillen’s account, the only other known IIA copy, at the Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem, is a damaged fragment.
We can know that these fragments belonged together while still lacking the story of their separation. That leaves something unusually tangible: a book whose printed contents could be repeated, but whose coloring and old numbering helped preserve the identity of a single copy.
The Morgan lists it as a highlight of Graphic Devotions: Late Medieval European Blockbooks, scheduled for November 6, 2026–May 16, 2027. The exhibition offers a reason to revisit a reunion that happened in 2022. For authentic images of the leaves, open McQuillen’s illustrated acquisition account; it includes pictures from both groups.