Friday, June 14, 2013

Keeping a low profile: printers keeping their names out of the papers in the sixteenth century

Here's a question: what authors was your typical sixteenth-century German printer most interested in printing but least interested in taking credit for? In other words, what authors with at least ten editions of their works in VD16 are proportionally most represented by unsigned editions?

The answer is not quite what I expected. Over 50% of the editions from just seventeen authors are unsigned. Here's the list: