Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet. Auf der Grundlage des gleichnamigen Werkes von Josef Benzing (review)

As the subtitle to this important book makes clear, it builds on the foundations laid by Josef Benzing (1904–81) in his work of the same title. Benzing made a lifelong study of German printers of the sixteenth century, publishing a pioneering first survey in 1936, followed by his Buchdruckerlexikon des 16. Jahrhunderts (Deutsches Sprachgebiet) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1952) and then by the much fuller work, now also covering seventeenth-century printers, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1963). When he died he had almost finished reading the page proofs of the second edition of this, which came out in 1982. Since then, 'Benzing' has remained the authoritative reference book on German printers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the 1982 edition, in order to minimize production costs, the main text of the entries was left virtually unchanged and only the listings of secondary literature were updated. This meant that the descriptive text sometimes reflected an older stage of scholarship than the bibliography — this was particularly the case with the entries for Hamburg printers, since the discoveries of Werner Kayser and Claus Dehn in their Bibliographie der Hamburger Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1968) had not been digested. The last twenty-five years have seen tremendous progress in research in the history of the book, especially in the early modern period with the completion of VD16, the twenty-five-volume union catalogue of sixteenth-century German imprints (published 1983–2000, containing c. 75,000 titles, to which a further 25,000 have since been added in the electronic version, www.vd16.de), and rapid progress made with VD17, the online catalogue of seventeenth-century imprints (www.vd17.de), which currently records 246,680 titles. Hence a further revision of 'Benzing' was clearly going to be desirable sooner or later.

Christoph Reske, hitherto best known for his study of the printing of the Nuremberg Chronicle, Die Produktion der Schedelschen Weltchronik in Nürnberg. The Production of Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), has risen to the challenge to give us what is, in effect, the third (though not so described) edition of 'Benzing', very considerably enlarged and revised. The basic structure is retained: the arrangement is alphabetical by place, from Aachen to Zwickau. The heading for each place (which includes older German and Latin names and current (for example Polish) names as appropriate, often with a useful historical note) is followed by a bibliography of works dealing with printing generally in the town concerned. Then come the entries for individual printers (helpfully now also with the variant spellings and Latinizations or German equivalents of their names) arranged chronologically by the dates of their period of activity, each with a note of any specific literature on them. Needless to say, the lists of secondary literature have been thoroughly updated — already including Oliver Duntze's Ein Verleger sucht sein Publikum. Die Straßburger Offizin des Matthias Hupfuff (1497/98–1520) (Munich: Saur, 2007) — and, equally important, Benzing's lists have not been 'weeded', so that 'Reske' really can be safely regarded as a replacement for 'Benzing'.

The new 'Reske' covers 381 places of printing (twenty-one more than the 1982 'Benzing') and 2,662 printers, including 181 previously unknown. The new places covered are Adlersberg, Auras, Brünn, Colditz, Dutenstein Castle, Freising, Groessen, Groß-Grönau, Häsingen, Horw, Höxter, Kaisheim, Klosterneuburg, Metz, Morges, Münden, Olmütz (Olomouc), Rendsburg, Stadtamhof, Troppau, and Winkel. In contrast, one or two places have disappeared (or appear under different names) in the light of recent research, and the same applies to a handful of persons regarded as printers by Benzing but now recognized to have been publishers only. It needs to be emphasized that Reske, like...