ABSTRACT
The Christian Egenolff music books were clearly intended to accommodate the pocket, if not the pocketbook, of an individual looking for cheap print. One could criticise Egenolff for stealing beautiful books and ultimately destroying their beauty, or for taking popular, practical texts, and producing 'bad' impressions of them. Bottom line, this man, Christian Egenolff, was a successful businessman, even when one compares his net worth to that of the richest man in the western world in the sixteenth century, namely Jacob Fugger. Among the five hundred books that Egenolff saw through the press between 1528 and 1555, very few show any evidence of having relied on commissions or on private funding for the underwriting of a book's publication. This statement seems to be true if only because few of his books are prefaced with long-winded, sycophantic dedications written by an author thanking a current or future employer, or thanking and praising the generosity of a patron.
