Christian Egenolff

Printer and publisher
Christian Egenolff was the largest and most famous publisher of vernacular scientific books in Germany. During his career he published more than five hundred titles, of which more than half were on scientific, medical, or technological subject. The rest were devotional tracts, humanistic works, and didactical manuals on subjects ranging from letter writing to law.

Egenolff was born in 1502 at Hadamar, near Mainz, and attended the University of Mainz from 1516 until 1519 but did not obtain a degree. From 1524 he lived in Strasbourg where he worked as a typefounder in the shop of Wolfgang Köpfel, a leading Protestant printer. In 1528 he opened his printing shop and began publishing assorted medical and scientific books, popular novels and chronicles, and humanistic works. In 1530 he sold his shop to Jacob Cammerlander and moved to Frankfurt am Main. It was a sound business decision as Strasbourg had nineteen printers, and in Frankfurt there was none. Frankfurt provided him with a virtually competition-free environment which was also an ideal center for marketing his books. It was a flourishing commercial city with two annual book fairs that drew publishers and bookdealers from throughout Germany and Europe. As his business grew Egenolff opened an office in Marburg and became the university’s official printer. By 1550 he owned two printing offices, seven houses in Frankfurt, and a paper mill in the Black Forest. After his death, his firm continued to operate under the Egenolff name until 1667.