ABSTRACT
BETWEEN 19 AND 23 October 2005, 284,838 people descended on the exhibition grounds at Frankfurt am Main to visit the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, the most important regular event in the publishing world's calendar. The association of publishing with Frankfurt has a long history - though not quite so long as one might imagine. Indeed, given the city's important role in the book trade, especially in the sixteenth century, it seems almost a paradox that it was such a relative latecomer as far as the introduction of printing was concerned. Leaving aside the short-lived press of Beatus Murner in the Franciscan friary at Frankfurt in 1511112, the first printer in the city was Christian Egenolph who arrived from Strasbourg in December 1530, to remain until his death in 1555. 1 This was three quarters of a century after the earliest printing at nearby Mainz, and in the meantime printing had established itself in many major German cities and abroad, beginning with Bamberg (c.1459), Strasbourg (1459/60), Cologne (1464/5), Rome (1467), Augsburg (1468), Venice (1469), Basle (1468/70), Nuremberg (1470), Paris (1476) - and even distant London. Only after Egenolph established the first long-term printing shop in Frankfurt did others recognize its favourable position; it then eclipsed the previous centres of the German book trade like Augsburg, Nuremberg, Basle, Strasbourg and (since the 1520s) Wittenberg in importance. Frankfurt really came into its own as a printing and publishing centre only in the second half of the sixteenth century, and already soon after 1600 it was overtaken by Leipzig. Among the men who made Frankfurt what it was were, besides Egenolph, Peter Braubach, Hermann Gulfferich, the publisher Sigmund Feyerabend and a bevy of printers associated with him, and Andre Wechel, a refugee from France following the 1572 St Bartholo-
, D 2 mew s ay massacre. Although, like most German cities, Frankfurt was a small place, with
15,000 inhabitants in 1475, it had long been an important town. The medieval kings and emperors, who had no fixed capital, are known to have
visited it some 300 times before 1378, and right down until 1806 it was here that the election of the emperor generally took place, and from 1563 onwards he was crowned here, too. In 1372 it had become an imperial free city, owing allegiance directly to the emperor and with the right to levy its own taxes and make its own laws. Its convenient location enabled it to become a centre of trade at an early date. A market is attested already in the eighth century. A privilege was granted for an autumn fair in 1240, though its origins probably go back even to the twelfth century, and a charter for a spring fair was granted by Emperor Ludwig IV (Ludwig der Bayer) in 1330. Frankfurt's chief asset was its location in the centre of Germany, almost equidistant from Lubeck, Venice, Vienna, Lyon, Paris, Antwerp and Amsterdam; no wonder, then, that merchants preferred to meet on the banks of the Main, rather than travel in person all the way to the extremities of Europe. Frankfurt lay on major trade routes linking Luneburg, Hamburg and Lubeck, with Scandinavia and the Baltic beyond, with Nuremberg and Prague in the east, Regensburg and Vienna on the Danube, and Augsburg, Venice and Italy in the south. Nevertheless, road transport was difficult and slow - five miles a day is said to have been average for a heavy wagon, and even sending a letter by messenger took many days: it counted as exceptionally fast for a letter to take only nine days from Frankfurt to Lubeck, and three weeks would have been more usual.3 Crucial to Frankfurt's commercial importance was its favourable position on the chief waterways, close to where the River Main joins the Rhine. On the Main lie the ecclesiastical centres of Bamberg and Wurzburg and the small imperial free city of Schweinfurt. The Rhine links Basle, Strasbourg, Worms, Mainz, Cologne and the Netherlands, and affords access to the North Sea. Water transport was ideal for heavy barrels of books. Christopher Plantin, for instance, would send his books by wagon from Antwerp to Cologne, where his colleague Maternus Cholinus would arrange onward transport up the Rhine to Frankfurt.4 On arrival at the Main quayside they could be rolled to the nearby Buchgasse or Buchergasse ('Book Lane') (Fig. 1), a name first attested in 1518, between the river bank, the city walls and the church of St. Leonhard. 5 (Fig. 2)
Yet, for all its convenience, transport on water was still difficult and hazardous and hampered by restrictive practices which would only be abolished through the efforts of Napoleon and Prussia in the nineteenth century. In the early modern period Germany was not the unified country it is today. The Holy Roman Empire comprised a multitude of small
The Frankfurt fair was only one of many. Towns large and small throughout Europe held fairs on a regular basis. 9 They would develop at places where trade routes intersected, where goods had to be loaded on to or off ships, and at places where rivers were crossed by bridges. 10 Leipzig, where the fair can be traced back to 1268, lay on the intersection of two major trade routes, the so-called Via Regia from Frankfurt via Erfurt to Leipzig and on to Breslau and Poland, and the Via Imperii, leading from Venice, Verona, across the Brenner to Innsbruck, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and on to the Hanseatic cities of Lubeck and Hamburg and beyond to Scandinavia. The Leipzig fair became even more important as German expansion eastwards continued in the later Middle Ages. Although itinerant traders could theoretically turn up anywhere at any time, it was in the interests of purveyors of bulky or heavy goods to go where people congregated. We need to remember that places we think of as major European cities today were, by our standards, very small in the early modern period: even Vienna's population was only about 20,000 in 1500. Merchants' travel plans were largely dictated by the dates of the fairs. At Vienna there were two major fairs: at Ascensiontide and around St Katharine's Day (25 November), each lasting for two weeks before and two weeks after the religious festival itself. At Krems they had the St James's Fair on 25 July and the Sts Simon and Jude Fair on 28 October. ll At Linz, where the fairs can be traced back to the thirteenth century, there was the Easter Fair, lasting two weeks, and the St Bartholomew's Fair which lasted for four weeks around 24 August. 12 At Leipzig the Spring Fair started on the third Sunday after Easter (Jubilate Sunday) and ran for a week until Cantate Sunday, while the Michaelmas Fair began on the Sunday after Michaelmas (29 September) and ended the following Sunday.13 At Friedberg in Hessen (20 miles north of Frankfurt) there were two fairs, each lasting a fortnight, one starting on St Walpurgis' Day, 1 May, and the Michaelmas fair beginning on 29 September. As for Frankfurt itself, the dates of the Lenten (Easter, Spring) Fair varied considerably over time, and precise details are now hard to determine. From 1366 it lasted two weeks, from Oculi (the fourth Sunday before Easter) until Judica (Passion Sunday, the second Sunday before Easter); the fair proved such a success that from 1384 to 1394 it was extended to almost four weeks, from Oculi until the end of Holy Week, much to the wrath of the ecclesiastical authorities; in 1399 it was agreed that, as from 1400, it should run from Oculi to the Friday before Palm Sunday, thus lasting just under three weeks. However,
1349 it was decreed that it should run from 15 August to 8 September, then from 15 August to 22 September, but from 1394 it was determined that it should end a week after the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September), thus on 15 September. In the late sixteenth centuty the Autumn fair, lasting three weeks, always began on a Monday between 6 and 12 September; the precise date depending on what day of the week the Nativity of the Virgin was celebrated: if this fell on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, the fair began on the Monday falling between 6 and 8 September; if it fell on Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday, it would begin on the Monday falling between 9 and 12 September. 16
The fairs were obviously hectic places, and seeing that they tended to follow one another in different places in quick succession there were inevitably sometimes mishaps. The inexorable calendar of events meant that printers would be under pressure to have a book ready for a certain deadline. After all, the fairs provided almost the only possibility for publishers to sell books in large quantities, particularly to other book dealers. To cite one example: the Zurich publisher Christoph Froschauer took 2,000 copies of his folio and octavo editions of Joachim von Watt's Epitome trium terrae partium to the Frankfurt fair in 1534 and managed to sell half of them. I? Obviously, therefore, it was vital to have one's books ready in time. If you missed one Frankfurt fair you had to wait six months for the next. A good instance of the importance of keeping to the schedule is furnished by Johann Schonsperger the Younger, who entered into an agreement with the Augsburg parchment-maker, paper merchant and publisher Peter Aprell to bring out an edition of 1,000 New Testaments on paper with six copies on vellum for Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. However, according to Schonsperger, Aprelliet him down badly: not only was he not able to supply sufficient vellum of a suitable quality, which meant that he incurred the wrath of the Elector, but the printing of the thousand copies on paper was delayed, too, so that he missed the deadline for the Frankfurt fair and lost money thereby.18 Many contemporary books show evidence of the pressure under which printers and publishers were working. For instance, the corrector ofJacob Wimpheling's Epitome rerum Germanicarum, Strasbourg: J. Priiss, 11 March 1505, apologises for any errors by saying that they had been forced to print the work quickly because of the imminent Frankfurt fair: Coacti sumus ob imminentes nundinas Francofurdenses intra brevissimum tempus id opus form is excudere. 19 And we know that when Luther's New Testament translation was being
printed in the summer of 1522, extreme measures had to be taken by the printer Melchior Lotter at Wittenberg to ensure it was ready for the Leipzig Michaelmas fair. Another rush job is reported by Euricius Cordus, Professor of Medicine at Marburg, who compiled a treatise on the English Sweating Sickness, a terrible epidemic ravaging Germany in the summer of 1529: writing on Thursday, 2 September that year, he says his Marburg printer was anxious to get his book to Frankfurt, about 100 km away, for the fair that began on 6 September; the book was printed on Saturday, 4 September.2() In 1557 we find a Leipzig bookseller having to defend himself before the authorities for selling an objectionable political pamphlet, offering the plausible excuse that he and his colleagues had not actually read the book while they were in Frankfurt because the fair was so hectic; they had merely glanced at the title, purchased a few copies and packed them up and sent them to Leipzig for resale, not realizing what the contents of the books were until they unpacked them again.21 Another kind of pressure resulting from the fair is exemplified by the Augsburg bookseller Georg Willer. In October 1559 he was in prison because of his involvement with sectarian printers. His wife pressed for his release on the grounds that the books he had bought in Frankfurt were expected imminently and, if they were impounded, not only would Willer himself suffer because he would be unable to supply his customers, who were already waiting for them, but the books themselves would be useless because, being calendars, practical handbooks and the like, they had a short shelf-life and would soon be obsolete. 22
Given the difficulties and hazards of travel it was not possible for every merchant to attend every fair in person. Some might make a point of attending a particular fair, at Frankfurt, for example, on a regular basis, or at least ensure that they were represented - Plantin, for instance, would send his son-in-law Moretus. Or they might concentrate on the fairs in a particular area - booksellers from southern Germany in particular regularly visited fairs at the towns on the Danube, with Linz proving an important venue for booksellers from Poland, Germany and Italy.23 Another Austrian venue was Hall in Tirol, on the north/south trade route, where a fair was established in 1356 and which in the sixteenth century became an important outlet for south German booksellers.24 This doubtless explains why this area was targeted for an inquiry into what kind of books were owned by the local population by the commission instituted by Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol in 1569, as they were suspected of possessing
many Protestant books. 25 As an alternative to visiting the fairs in person a merchant might employ the services of an agent living locally or indeed he might choose to have himself represented at the fair by an agent not himself resident in the fair town. The Lyon printer Sebastian Gryphius, for instance, marketed his books at Frankfurt through the Basle printer Andreas Cratander: nearly all of Gryphius's books of scholarly interest, more than 140 titles, are listed in Cratander's 1539 catalogue of the books available through his Frankfurt depot. 26 Later, Plantin, too, would represent other publishers on a commission basis, their goods being held on sale or return.
