Book of hours (German).

This rare survival, a fragment of a pocket-size German Book of Hours, is a never-bound but fully printed sheet of paper: we see it as it came off the press. The format is known as 16mo, meaning that one side of the sheet contains 16 pages. The sheet was used as binding material in a Ptolemy edition purchased in 1509 by a Nuremberg ecclesiastic, Johannes Protzer. The Bodleian Library owns one half of this same sheet, recovered from the binding of a Sebastian Brant work purchased by Protzer in 1499. Presumably hundreds of copies of this small Book of Hours (measuring roughly 4 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches) were printed and sold, all of which were eventually lost or thrown away. Only the unused sheets sent as waste to a Nuremberg binder have made their way, through a secondary channel of preservation, into the twenty-first century.