spect of some of these men of the Renaissance, an
uncalculating and generous desire to help gifted men to find their true
place in the world where they might do their largest work. This, in an
age when competition and jealous rivalry in public and in private life
was as common as it is now, may give pause to the cynic and joy to the
lover of human kindness.

ANTON KOBERGER

(=No printer's mark known=)

We are in a different world when we turn to the fourth of our five
representative printers, Anton Koberger, of Nuremberg. During the forty
years of his career as a publisher, between 1473 and 1513, he issued 236
separate works, most of them in several volumes, and of the whole lot
none show any taint of reforming zeal. Koberger was a loyal Catholic,
and his published books were largely theological and all strictly
orthodox in nature. He is distinguished in two respects from the other
German printers of his time, the time between the death of Gutenberg and
the rise of Martin Luther. In the first place his work showed great
typographical excellence, with many fonts of handsome Gothic type and a
lavish use of woodcut illustrations. In the second place, his publishing
business was far better organized, far more extensive in its selling and
distributing machinery, than that of any other printer in Europe. We
learn that he had agents not only in every German city, but in the very
headquarters of his greatest competitors at Paris, Venice, and Rome, and
in such more distant places as Vienna, Buda-Pesth, and Warsaw. The
twenty-four presses in his own Nuremberg establishment were not
sufficient for his enormous business, and he let out printing jobs on
contract or commission to printers at Strasburg, Basel, and elsewhere.
The true German spirit of discipline appears in a contemporary account
of his printing plant at Nuremberg. He had more than a hundred workmen
there, including not only compositors, pressmen, and proof-readers, but
binders, engravers, and illuminators. All these were fed by their
employer in a common dining-hall apart from the works, and we are told
that they marched between the two buildings three times a day with
military precision.

Koberger employed for a time the services of Albrecht Duerer, the famous
engraver, not only for the illustration of books but also for expert
oversight of the typographical form. Typography in its golden age was
rightly regarded not as a mere mechanical trade but as an ar