With a literacy rate hovering around an estimated 5 to 10 per cent of the population during the Middle Ages, only a select few of society’s upper echelons and religious castes had use for books. So who would have use for a sextuplet of stories bound by a single, multi-hinged cover like this? Some seriously busy scholar.
Known as a dos-à-dos (or “back-to-back”) book, this collection is believed to have been bound in the later part of the 16th Century and includes devotional texts, such as Martin Luther’s Der kleine Catechismus, which had been printed in Germany between the 1550s and 1570s.
The book is currently owned by the National Swedish Library and resides in Stockholm, among the Royal Library’s archives. Only for advanced readers, advanced readers with low attentions spans. [Erik Kwakkel Tumblr via Neatorama – Image: National Library of Sweden]