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:

Authors	Anon	Total	Percent
Poyssel, Eustachius	12	12	100.0%
Stengler, Fabius	12	13	92.3%
Gebhard <Köln, Erzbischof>	20	27	74.1%
Elisabeth <I., England, Königin>	10	14	71.4%
Oranje-Nassau, Willem van	9	13	69.2%
Werner, Johann Sigismund	10	15	66.7%
Karl <Frankreich, König, VIIII.>	23	36	63.9%
Friedrich <Würzburg, Bischof>	7	12	58.3%
Rollenhagen, Georg	14	24	58.3%
Johann Wilhelm <Sachsen-Weimar, Herzog>	19	34	55.9%
Ferdinand <I., Römisch-Deutsches Reich, Kaiser>; Moritz <Sachsen, Kurfürst>	10	18	55.6%
Heinrich <IV., Frankreich, König>	25	45	55.6%
Maximilian <II., Römisch-Deutsches Reich, Kaiser>	31	56	55.4%
Francus, Jacobus	37	67	55.2%
Condé, Louis de <1530-1569>	8	15	53.3%
Heinrich <II., Frankreich, König>	8	15	53.3%
Severus, Paul	9	17	52.9%

It's not too surprising, perhaps, to find an apocalyptic calculator (Poyssel) and another prophetic tract (Severus) on this list. One example of fool literature (Stengler) and Rollenhagen (principally his Postreuter  and Hinkender Bote) are a bit more surprising. Johann Sigismund Werner makes sense for his religious views, although Caspar Schwenckfeld comes in at only 31%. Jacobus Francus, a pseudonym in any case, deals with recent and perhaps politically sensitive history and might be considered proto-journalism.

But the real surprise are all the writings attributed to royalty, including several foreign monarchs. I suspect that what proved controversial was appropriating their edicts or other writings and publishing them as polemic of one kind or another, which might be a politically sensitive undertaking of the kind that most printers preferred to keep their names off of, even as they were making money off of them.

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