It is well known that the success of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation was greatly aided by the printing press. Luther wrote numerous short sermons that could be printed quickly and distributed across Europe. This brought great success to the Wittenberg printer Georg Rhau, who was the town’s largest printer during Luther’s lifetime. However, new data, available due to large bibliographic projects such as the Universal Short Title Catalogue, reveals this to be far from true. It was actually Hans Lufft who was the largest printer in Wittenberg, printing more than double the output of Rhau.
This discrepancy is due to the fact that traditional bibliography viewed a printer’s output in terms of the number of editions printed. This results in large editions, such as Bibles, being treated equal to small editions, such as pamphlets. It is far more accurate to analyse a printer’s output in terms of the number of sheets printed. Thus Bibles and larger works, specialties of Hans Lufft, are given their proper weight. This type of analysis is only possible due to recent advancements in large, online bibliographic projects.
While sheet count analysis transforms traditional understandings of local print industries, it can also disrupt assumptions held about the wider German and European industries. Wittenberg went from having no printing press in 1500 to being the largest print centre in the Holy Roman Empire by the end of the century. However, Wittenberg produced large numbers of Bibles and pamphlets, which could either devalue or inflate its place in the larger German industry. Sheet count analysis will help solve this dilemma and provide scholars with a much more accurate depiction of the early modern print world.