Tracing the emergence of Fraktur is complicated by two facts: On the one hand, contemporary evidence, such as invoices, letters and type specimens, is at best fragmentary and nearly impossible to contextualise without an analysis of the books themselves. On the other hand, researchers are simply overwhelmed by the amount of material available. For the 16th century alone, the German national bibliography VD16 (www.vd16.de) lists over 100,000 titles. This makes it impractical to look at every book individually and determine its fonts or even only its main text font.