THOMAS ANSHELM.
[Full text]		A. THER HOERNEN.
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Printing had not established itself at Cologne until four years later than at Strassburg. Ulric Zell, at the dispersal of the Mainz printers, settled himself in this city, where he was printing from about 1463 to nearly the end of the fifteenth century. He was clearly not an innovator, for he never printed a book in German, and did not adopt any of the improvements of his confrères who had settled themselves in Italy; he “rigidly adhered to the severe style of Schoeffer, printing all his books from three sizes of a rude face of a round gothic type.” It is not to him therefore that we can look for anything in the way of Printers’ Marks, the earliest Cologne printer to adopt which was apparently Arnold Ther Hoernen, whose colophons, of which we give an example, were often printed in red. His Mark is a triangle of which the two upright sides are prolonged with a crosslet; in the centre a star, and on either side the gothic letters T H, the whole being on a very small shield hanging from a broken stump. Herman Bumgart, one of whose books bears the subscription “Gedruckt in Coelne up den Alden Mart tzo dem wilden manne,” and who was in Cologne at the latter end of the fifteenth century, has a special interest to us from the probability that he was in some way connected with the early Scottish printers.

HERMAN BUMGART.

Once started, the idea of the Mark was quickly taken up. Johann Koelhoff, 1470–1500, the first printer to use printed signatures (in his edition of Nyder, “Preceptorium divinæ legis,” 1472), came out with a large but roughly drawn example, the arms of Cologne, consisting of a knight’s helmet, with peacock feathers, crest, and elaborate mantles, surmounting a shield with the three crowns in chief, the rest of the escutcheon blank, and rabbits in the foreground. Koelhoff (who describes himself “de Lubeck”) was the printer of the “Cologne Chronicle,” 1499, and of an edition of “Bartholomæus de Proprietatibus Rerum,” 1481. Several interesting Cologne Marks of the first years of the sixteenth century may be noted. For instance, Eucharius Cervicornus, 1517–36, used a caduceus on an ornamented shield, and printed among other books what is believed to be the earliest edition of Maximilianus Transylvanus’ “De Moluccis Insulis,” 1523, in which the discoveries of Ferdinand Magellan and the earliest circumnavigation of the globe were announced. Like Koelhoff, Nicolas Cæsar, or Kaiser, who was established as a printer at Cologne in 1518, used the Cologne arms as a Mark, which is sufficiently distinct from the earlier example to be quoted here. Johann Soter, 1518–36, is another exceedingly interesting personality in the early history of Cologne printing. We give the more elaborate of the two marks used by him and reproduced by Berjeau: the shield contains the Rosicrucian triple triangle on the threshold of a Renaissance door. During the latter end of his career at Cologne, Soter had also an establishment at Solingen, where he printed “several works of a description which rendered too hazardous their publication in the former city.” Arnold Birckmann and his successors, 1562–92, used the accompanying Mark of a hen under a tree. After Günther Zainer, 1468–77, who introduced printing into Augsburg, the most notable typographer of this city is perhaps Erhart Ratdolt, to whom reference is made in the chapter on Italian Marks. We give the rather striking Mark—a white fleur-de-lis on black ground springing from a globe—of Erhart Oglin, Augsburg, 1505–16, one of whose productions, by Conrad Reitter, 1508, is remarkable as having a series of Death-Dance pictures; Hans Holbein was eight years of age when it appeared, and was then living in his native town of Augsburg.

JOHANN KOELHOFF.

NICHOLAS CÆSAR.J. SOTER.
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