Books, because they had to be handwritten, had been rare and very expensive before Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1447 had made it feasible to print books and maps for a larger customer basis.

Germany has by the late fifteenth century become the publishing center of Europe.

Hartmann Schedel is best known for his writing the text for the Nuremberg Chronicle, known as Schedelsche Weltchronik, or Schedel's World Chronicle), commissioned by Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister, and published in 1493 in Nuremberg.

Maps in the Chronicle are the first ever illustrations of many cities and countries.

Its publisher, Anton Koberger, born to an established Nuremberg family of bakers, had made his first appearance in 1464 in the Nuremberg list of citizens.

He had married Ursula Ingram in 1470 and after her death he remarried in 1491 to another member of the Nuremberg patriciate, Margarete Holzschuher.

In all, he will father twenty-five children, of whom thirteen will survive to adulthood.

Koberger is the godfather of Albrecht Dürer, whose family lives on the same street.

In the year before Dürer's birth in 1471 he had ceased goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher.

He quickly became the most successful publisher in Germany, absorbing his rivals over the years to become a large capitalist enterprise, with twenty-four presses in operation, printing numerous works simultaneously and employing at its height one hundred workers: printers, typesetters, typefounders, illuminators, and the like.

Koberger’s illustrated edition of Die Weltchronik includes six hundred and forty-five separate woodcuts, among which the most famous are the views of European towns.

Koberger employs as designers such artists as Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, Michael Wolgemut, and the young Albrecht Dürer, who had entered Wolgemut's studio in 1486 at the age of fifteen.