Johannes Mentelin
Since at the end of the 1450s, when Mentelin founded his Strasbourg printery, there was still no other place where printing was done besides Mainz,
The first printing which carries Mentelin’s name is Augustine’s Tractatus de arte praedicandi from the year 1465. However, it is assumed that Mentelin had already begun to print significantly earlier, probably even already in 1458. His oldest known printed work is a Latin Bible printed with 49 lines per page (“B49”), whose first volume is dated 1460. As Gutenberg’s Bible was printed with 42 lines per page, Mentelin’s had fewer pages and proved handier.
About 40 printed works are ascribed to Mentelin’s Strasbourg Offizin. His printing and publishing list contained predominantly theological and philosophical works in Latin, whose purity of text was ensured by scholarly proofreaders. Among others, works of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, John Chrysostom, Isidore of Seville and Albertus Magnus were issued. In 1472 he published the Postilla super totam Bibliam, Nicolaus de Lyra’s commentary of the Bible. Mentelin also published texts of classical antiquity (such as Virgil’s Opera and the Comoediae of Terence). As the only German book printer, Mentelin printed Medieval court literature, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach‘s Parzival and Der jüngere Titurel (“The Younger Titurel”) of Albrecht von Scharfenberg.
His first printing of a Bible in vernacular language stands out, the so-called Mentelin Bible of 1466, the first attested edition of the full Bible in the German language, translated from the Vulgate, and one of the earliest printed works in German. The Mentelin Bible was the basis for a further thirteen pre-Reformation editions of the Bible (including those by Zainer and Sorg) which appeared in southern Germany before editions of the Luther Bible, based on Hebrew and Greek, from 1522.