Anna Rügerin

died after 1484

The real first woman typographer was Anna Rügerin, from Augsburg, in the South of Germany, who took full control of the family print shop when her husband Thomas died and, more importantly, she managed to publish her name as a printer on two editions of a book of the time.

In 1484, almost six centuries ago, Rügerin printed two books in the in-folio format, in a press she owned in the city of Augsburg. Her work appeared less than twenty years after the arrival of the movable-type printing press in that city.

The first of Rügerin’s known books is an edition of Eike of Repgow’s compendium of customary law, the Sachsenspiegel, dated 22 June 1484.

The Sachsenspiegel, written in the 13th century, was the first major work of German prose. The catalogue Beschreibung derjenigen bücher welch von erfindung der buchdruckerkunst bis M.d.xx ... gedruckt worden sind by Georg Wolfgang Panzer details some of its characteristics.

The second book was an edition of the Formulare und deutsch rhetorica, a manual of instructions for the editing of official documents and of letters, printed on 29 July 1484.

These books were composed in the Gothic font 1:120G of Johann Schönsperger. Researcher Sheila Edmunds Schönsperger is the brother of Anna Rügerin, as his mother, Barbara Traut Schönsperger, married the printer Johann Bämler as her second husband (probably in 1467 or 1468).

This marriage, according to Edmunds, would have produced an extensive familial network devoted to the book trade in Augsburg. Anna Rügerin’s husband, Thomas Rüger, jointly published books with Schönsperger in 1481 and 1482. Johann Schönsperger could have helped Anna Rügerin, who had inherited Rüger’s press, to make her first printing, so it’s obvious that printing was a family affair for the first female typographer of our times.