Company
DissolvedPeter Schöffer's press
Mainz · 1457 – 1503
Schöffer died in 1503. His sons kept a printing house, but the shop that had inherited Gutenberg's equipment did not stay a European center.
Peter Schöffer had been Gutenberg's principal workman. After Fust won the press in 1455, Schöffer stayed with the equipment, married into Fust's family, and from 1457 put his own name, with Fust's, on the books.
The Mainz Psalter of that year is the first book with a printed date and a printed printer's mark. That mark matters. It says a workshop had become a firm a buyer could ask for again.
From experiment to trade
Schöffer printed theology, law, and indulgences, which is to say he printed what institutions would pay for in quantity. He cut type, including music type, and he kept the standards high enough that Mainz printing remained a luxury product. The jobs Gutenberg had gathered into one room became, under Schöffer, a house a son could inherit.
What the house could not survive
Mainz was sacked in 1462, during a civic war, and many journeymen left for other cities. That diaspora is how printing reached Italy and Paris. Schöffer himself stayed and worked until his death in 1503. His descendants printed on, in a smaller way. The shop was no longer the only one, which is the fate of every first firm in a new trade.
The work it organized
- Master printer
- Punchcutter
- Journeyman compositor
- Rubricator
On the timeline
Related
- Gutenberg's workshopDissolved