As a printer Froben was distinguished by the singular beauty of his roman type, the perfection of his presswork, and the artistic decoration of his books. In this last respect he was much indebted to the genius of Hans Holbein, whom he discovered as a young wood-engraver seeking work as Basel. With that keen eye for unrecognized genius which marked his career he employed Holbein to design borders and initials for his books. Later, with an equally sagacious and generous spirit, perceiving that the young artist was too great a man to spend his days in a printing office, he procured for him through Sir Thomas More an introduction to the court of Henry VIII, where he won fame and fortune as a portrait painter. I narrate the incident because it illustrates a very attractive and amiable aspect 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.
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.