Peter Schöffer the Younger

Haus zum Korb, Mainz

Schöffer was born in Mainz between 1475 and 1480, into a family involved in the early printing business.[1][2] His father was Peter Schöffer (c. 1425–1503), who had been an apprentice with Johannes Gutenberg. His mother was Christina Fust, the only daughter of Johann Fust, who had lent money to Gutenberg and taken over his print shop after Gutenberg defaulted on his loans.[3] Schöffer learned the trades of punchcutter and type caster.[4][5] He became very skilled in this; his types were later also used in his brother's workshop and traded also to other cities.[5] He married Katharina, of unknown last name, and they had a son, Ivo (c. 1500–1555), who also became a printer.[2] After his father's death c. 1503, the print workshop was taken over by his brother Johann Schöffer.[6] Peter Schöffer the Younger inherited the "zum Korb" house in Mainz and set up his workshop there c. 1509.[7][8] The first book printed by Schöffer was Responsoria Moguntina c. 1510, but his specialty was the printing of music.[8] He cast type for mensural notation and imitated and reprinted work of Ottaviano Petrucci. His first printed work with musical notation was a tablature book for organ and lute.[9] In 1512, he sold the house and moved to Worms, where he came in contact with the anabaptists.[10]

Gospel of John, from the Tyndale Bible

While in Worms, Schöffer printed the first New Testament in English in 1526, the Tyndale Bible, translated from the Greek by William Tyndale.[11][12] Unlike Tyndall's earlier fragment printed in Cologne, it is a complete New Testament. To smuggle copies to England, the books were hidden in bales of cloth and transported in ships along the Rhine.[11] Although the book was printed in an edition of 6000 octavo copies,[13] only three of them have survived, and just one of these contains the title page, the copy found in 1996 in an old bible collection in Stuttgart.[14][15][16]

In 1527, Schöffer printed the first complete German translation of the books of prophets from the Hebrew Old Testament, made by anapatist scholars. Martin Luther owned a copy.[17] The title frame of this book, the Worms Prophets, is the same as that used in the Stuttgart copy of the Tyndale Bible.[18] The anabaptist preacher Jacob Kautz combined own translations with those of Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, and as a result, Schöffer printed the first complete German Protestant bible in 1529, the Worms Bible.[19][20]

In 1529, Schöffer moved to Straßburg, where he married Anna Pfintzner, a local widow, and obtained citizenship on 14 December 1529. [21] In Straßburg, Schöffer collaborated with Matthias Apiarius.[22] Among other works, they printed a treatise on music theory.[23] He moved on to Basel before 1539, and spent some time in Venice in 1541/42 before returning to Basel,[21] where he died in January 1547.[8]