Expositio symboli contra Jovinianum haereticum

Ulrich Zell (died c.1507) was an early printer in

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...

, Germany.

Biography

Zell was born at Hanau am Main, date unknown. He learned the art of printing before 1462 in the printing establishment of

Johann Fust Johann Fust or Faust (c. 1400 – October 30, 1466) was an early German printer. Family background Fust was born to burgher family of Mainz, traceable back to the early thirteenth century. Members of the family held many civil and religi ...

and

Peter Schöffer Peter Schöffer or Petrus Schoeffer (c. 1425 – c. 1503) was an early German printer, who studied in Paris and worked as a manuscript copyist in 1451 before apprenticing with Johannes Gutenberg and joining Johann Fust, a goldsmith, lawyer, and m ...

, and seems, shortly after the catastrophe of 1462, to have gone to Cologne, whose university gave promise of a market for printed works. Zell was printing at Cologne apparently as early as 1463, although his first dated book is 1466. His work as printer and

publisher Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

can be traced up to the year 1502; altogether about 120 of his publications are known. Of these, however, only nine bear his name, but in all probability he printed and published many more. In outline and cut his six kinds of type are strikingly similar to the " Durandus" and " Clements" types of Fust and Schoffer; it would even seem that a number of the matrices of the "Clements" type had been used. Most of the books printed by Zell were text-books in

quarto Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produc ...

form for the university. Among the fine productions of his printing shop is an undated edition of the

Latin Bible The Bible translations into Latin date back to classical antiquity. Latin translations of the Bible were used in the Western part of the former Roman Empire until the Reformation. Those translations are still used along with translations from Latin ...

in two volumes. At first he called himself ''

clericus Clericus may refer to: * Jean Leclerc (Le Clerc), also la, Johannes Clericus (1657-1736), a Swiss theologian and biblical scholar * Franciscus Clericus * '' Tagiades clericus'', a spread-winged skipper butterfly belonging to the family Hesperii ...

'' (of the lower orders), but as early as 1471 he married and became a citizen and householder of Cologne. In 1473 he bought the important manorial estate of " Lyskirchen", to which he transferred the main part of his business. In the colophons of his books the place of business is called "apud Lyskirchen". The purchase, sometime later, of various houses, lands, and properties yielding revenues, show that Zell had become a prosperous man. It is also proof of his importance that for a long time he filled the office of Kirchenmeister (church-master) of "S. Maria an Lyskirchen". Of much importance in the history of the discovery of printing is Zell's statement, preserved in the ''

Chronicle of Cologne A chronicle ( la, chronica, from Greek ''chroniká'', from , ''chrónos'' – "time") is a historical account of events arranged in chronological order, as in a timeline. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and lo ...

'' of 1499, that the year 1450 was the date of the beginning of printing, that the country-squire

Johann Gutenberg Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (; – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and craftsman who introduced letterpress printing to Europe with his movable-type printing press. Though not the first of its kind, earlier designs w ...

was the inventor of it, and that the first book printed was the Latin Bible, the

Vulgate The Vulgate (; also called (Bible in common tongue), ) is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels u ...

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Zell, Ulrich German printers Printers of incunabula 15th-century births 1500s deaths Medieval German merchants 16th-century German businesspeople 15th-century German businesspeople