Make Your Own Dance of Death

Summary: The book, Dodendantz, is very jumbled. By repeating the steps that the printer went through 486 years ago, we might discover why.

The format of Dodendantz is called quarto. This means that the printer folds the sheet twice in order to get 4 leaves or 8 pages as shown by the diagram below:

Sounds easy, right?

We'll start with one side of the sheet and use the pictures from the dance of death from 1489, namely the hermit, the canon, Death with scythe, Death on the lion and Death with spade.

1. Remember to number the pages, so that the bookbinder can put them in the right order. This is sheet number 2, so we'll write a B.
2. Unfortunately we only have 3 pictures of Death, since the picture of Death with arrow seems to have disappeared between 1489 and 1520. No problem, we'll fill the vacant space with the three little skulls from the title page.
3. We don't have a picture of the official because he didn't appear in the 1489-edition, so we'll content ourselves with the text alone.
4. The parish priest didn't appear in 1489 either, so that's one more picture we're missing. We'll just show a picture of Jesus on the cross instead.

When this side of the sheet has been printed, we'll turn it over. The other side is even easier. Put down the next 4 dancers: physician, abbot, monk and knight. There's only 1 problem:

1. We still need the fourth picture of Death, but this time we'll skip Death entirely and add the crusader's picture and dialogue. This will fill up the page.

All that's left is to fold the sheet and cut it open:

When you open up the pages it'll look like this (click to enlarge). Notice the three little poppy fruits in the lower left part of the frame around the crucifixion scene. It's because of this logo that the printery is referred to as Mohnkopf.

Oops! Something went wrong: Death appears on the right of all the page openings. This means that our readers will have to read Death's lines to the right first and then the humans reply to the left.

Well, sheets happen, as we printers say. Maybe this is why Dodendantz was the last book to appear from the Mohnkopf printery and the wood blocks were sold to young Hans Vingaard, who brought them along to Copenhagen.

Further information

• Dodendantz (1520).
• Des dodes dantz (1489).
• Copenhagen's Dance of Death (1536).
• Is Dodendantz older than Des dodes dantz?
• Relationship between Berlin's dance of death and Dodendantz

Dansk Lübeck's dance of death Essays Make Your Own Dance of Death