Records place Anton Koberger in Nuremberg’s citizen lists by 1464. This matters because legal residency and civic standing supported his later ability to run a large print-and-bookselling business in the city.
In 1470, Koberger established the first printing house in Nuremberg. This step positioned the city as a major center in the early European print trade and created the workshop base that later produced the Nuremberg Chronicle.
By 1475, Koberger was producing Latin Bible editions as part of his growing program of religious publishing. Large, repeat print runs like these helped build the capital, labor routines, and distribution channels needed for later, more complex illustrated books.
On 1483-02-17, Koberger published a major German-language Bible in Nuremberg, now often called the “Koberger Bible.” It combined movable-type text with extensive woodcut illustration, showing how printers could scale up expensive, image-heavy books for a wider market.
In 1491, Anton Koberger published Stephan Fridolin’s Schatzbehalter (a devotional work), illustrated with woodcuts designed by Michael Wolgemut. Projects like this strengthened collaboration between printers and artist workshops—skills crucial for the Chronicle’s huge illustration program.
A surviving contract shows that printing of the Latin Nuremberg Chronicle ran from 1492-03-16 into 1493, reflecting a highly planned production process. The agreement also helps historians reconstruct how paper supply, type choices, and labor were organized for one of the period’s most complex books.
On 1493-07-12, Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (the Nuremberg Chronicle) was issued in Latin, printed and published by Anton Koberger. The book’s large format and integrated text-and-image layout made it a landmark example of what early printing could achieve at scale.
The German translation edition was completed on 1493-12-23, expanding the Chronicle’s reach beyond Latin-reading scholars. The German colophon date is important evidence of how quickly the project was adapted for a wider literate public in late 15th-century cities.
The Chronicle’s woodcut images were designed by Michael Wolgemut and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, working with a large workshop. Their designs helped standardize city views, biblical scenes, and historical portraits in a way that shaped how readers pictured world history in print.
In 1496, an unauthorized (pirated) edition of the Chronicle was printed in Augsburg by Johann (Hans) Schönsperger. This episode shows how successful illustrated books quickly created copycat markets—and how limited copyright protections were in early print culture.
A 1509 document records substantial unsold stock of the Chronicle (including hundreds of Latin copies). The figures reveal a key tension in early printing: even celebrated “best-sellers” carried major financial risk because large print runs tied up capital in paper, labor, and storage.
Anton Koberger died on 1513-10-03 in Nuremberg. By then, his shop had helped define what a large early printing-and-publishing operation could be, and his role in producing the Nuremberg Chronicle remained a long-lasting symbol of the printing revolution’s reach into art, scholarship, and commerce.
Anton Koberger's Nuremberg Press and the Nuremberg Chronicle (c. 1470–1513)