In the actual number of separate works issued, Koberger was possibly equalled by one or more of his contemporaries, but in respect to literary importance and costliness, and in the beauty and excellence of the typography, the Koberger publications were not equalled by any books of the time excepting the issues of Aldus in Venice. He did not limit his publishing undertakings to the works printed from his own presses, but gave contracts for the printing of a number of important publications to printers in other cities. In 1525, for instance, Grüninger of Strasburg prints for Koberger the translation by Pirckheimer of the _Geography_ of Ptolemy, and Amerbach of Basel, who had begun his work as a corrector with Koberger, printed for him, later, a number of works. Koberger’s correspondence shows that he had agents or active representatives not only in the other book-centres of the empire, such as Frankfort, Leipzig, Vienna, Basel, Strasburg, and Cologne, but in more distant cities, with which business interchange must, during the first years of the sixteenth century, have been subject to serious risks and to many interruptions, such as Paris, Buda-Pesth, Warsaw, Venice, Florence, Rome, Antwerp, Bruges, and Leyden. In this matter of organising connections and distributing machinery throughout the Continent, Koberger had a decided advantage over his great contemporary Aldus, who found, as we have seen, no little difficulty in maintaining permanent satisfactory arrangements for the distribution of his books north of the Alps. Aldus was obliged to depend chiefly upon his direct correspondence with individual buyers among the scholars of Europe, but Koberger secured larger results by utilising the services of the book-trade, the organisation of which in Germany and France was now taking shape. He was himself, in fact, a bookseller as well as a publisher and printer, selling both to the book-trade and at retail, and he was the first of the booksellers of Germany, and possibly of Europe, to issue a classified catalogue of current publications. Kapp describes his book-shop as the best equipped repository for standard literature (_Sortiments-Buchhandlung_), in Germany. Possessing full knowledge and experience of all divisions of book-making and of book-selling, Koberger was in a position to take an active part in furthering the organisation of the German book-trade, of which for a number of years he was recognised as the natural leader.