Hi, I'm Des Cowley, the Rare Printed Collections Manager at the State Library of Victoria.

The book we're going to look at now is known as Liber Chronicarum, or Chronicle of the World, but it's better known to us as the 'Nuremberg Chronicle', after the city in which it was first printed in 1493.

The birth of printing is generally ascribed to Johann Gutenberg, who printed his famous Bible in Main, Germany around about 1455.

The Nuremberg Chronicle is perhaps the most ambitious book printed prior to the year 1500. It attempted no less than to chronicle all known knowledge about the world, from creation up to the year of its publication in 1493 - history, geography, religion and myth. It includes almost 2000 woodcut illustrations printed from some 645 individual wood blocks, including an impressive set of double page woodcuts depicting the cities of Europe. It's been called the crown of German medieval craftsmanship.

It also includes a map of the world as it was known in 1493, showing Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East, across to India. A series of woodcut figures to the side represents the beings believed to exist outside the limits of the known world.

It's instructive to compare the world map depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle with the one printed in Abraham Ortelius's great atlas of 1574. These two books were published less than 80 years apart, little more than the span of a human life, and yet the boundaries of the known world had increased dramatically.

In 1493, Nuremberg was one of the great German centres of book production, and the publisher of the Nuremberg Chronicle, Anton Koberger, was the most renowned German printer of the day, with 24 presses in operation and over a 100 craftsmen in his employ. The artists who illustrated the book were Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. The young Albrecht Durer was apprenticed to Wolgemut's workshop at the time and it's almost certain that Durer had a hand in the illustrations.

Koberger's timing in issuing the book was perhaps unfortunate. For a book that attempted to impart all known knowledge about the world, the Nuremberg Chronicle appeared in almost in the same year that Columbus reached the Americas. As a source of information about the world, it was almost instantly out of date.

As an example of the craft of German book production prior to 1500, however, it remains unsurpassed.