Anton Coberger

Koberger was the godfather of Albrecht Dürer, whose family lived on the same street.

• Illustration — Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493 Anton Koberger was born in 1440 to an established Nuremberg family of bakers, and makes his first appearance in 1464 in the Nuremberg list of citizens. In 1470 he married Ursula Ingram, the daughter of a well-off tradesman, and after her death he remarried a member of the Nuremberg patriciate, Margarete Holzschuher (1470–1539), daughter of city councilor Gabriel Holzschuher, in 1491. She was also a cousin of the city councilor Hieronymus Holzschuher who was portrayed by his friend Dürer in 1526. Anton Koberger would become the first of his family to become a printer. In the year before his godson Dürer's birth in 1471, he ceased goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher. He quickly became the most successful publisher in Germany, absorbing his rivals over the years to become a large capitalist enterprise, with twenty-four presses in operation, printing numerous works simultaneously and employing at its height 100 workers: printers, typesetters, typefounders, illuminators, and the like. Constantly improving his business prospects, he sent out traveling agents and established links with booksellers all over Western Europe, including Venice, Europe's other great centre of printing, Milan, Paris, Lyon, Vienna and Budapest. At the supply end, he obtained two papermills. In Basel, he collaborated with Johann Amerbach. In all he fathered twenty-five children, of whom thirteen survived to adulthood. He probably commissioned the Haller Madonna from Dürer, as a gift for his daughter Ursula who had married the young patrician Wolf Haller of the famous Haller von Hallerstein family. Wolf Haller initially entered his father-in-law's business as a helper and traveler, but after a few years he fell out with him and fled to Vienna, where he died in 1505. Koberger's printing ended in 1504 when he stopped publishing. During his printing career, he had published 220 titles. The many sons turned out to be partly wasteful, partly incapable, and apparently at odds. Some of them continued as goldsmiths and jewelers. The business continued, albeit not as a publisher, only as an assortment. The last known work is a “Bohemian Bible”, printed in 1540 by Melchior Koberger with the publisher Leonhard Milchtaler.