Johann Reger

Johann Reger, also recorded in period and reference sources as Johannes, Joannes, Ioannes, or Hannss Reger, was born in 1454 in Kemnat, an area now part of Stuttgart. He worked as a printer and publisher in Ulm, Holy Roman Empire, from 1486 to 1499. He is credited in reference sources with a 1486 reissue of Ptolemy's Geographia, related to Lienhart Holl's earlier 1482 Ulm edition, though the specific commissioning circumstances behind that reissue are not corroborated in the sources reviewed for this profile and should be treated as unverified.

He is recorded as having died after 1499, but the exact date and place of death are unknown in the sources consulted. No day or month of birth is documented either. No education, apprenticeship, or training record has been found for him; the only documented education under the name Johann Reger belongs to a modern, living German control-engineering academic at the Technische Universitat Ilmenau, an entirely different person with no connection to the 15th-century printer. Readers should also be careful not to confuse this Johann Reger with the composer Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian "Max" Reger (1873 to 1916), who is unrelated.

No exact, attributable critic quotes about Johann Reger in a major outlet were found in the sources consulted. Modern discussion of him is limited to bibliographic and print-history reference material, chiefly encyclopedia entries on early Ulm printers and catalogue notes on his Geographia reissue, rather than art criticism.

No catalogue raisonne exists for Johann Reger, and none would be expected for a figure of his period and profession. No auction record for a work created by him as an artist has been confirmed in any source consulted. The name does appear twice in modern sale records, but in both cases as the publisher, not the artist: a 1486 edition of Tabula Moderna Italie, printed at Ulm by Johann Reger, sold for a hammer price of USD 20,000 at a July 2025 sale reported by the auction house itself, and a Ptolemy world map published by Reger sold for USD 246,000 at a reported two-day sale covered by trade press. Both prices attach to books and maps he printed or published, not to a work of his own artistic creation, so they cannot be reported as an artist's auction record.

Johann Reger is not a documented visual artist with a fine art auction market. Books and maps bearing his printer's imprint occasionally appear in the rare-book and antiquarian map market, where recorded prices attach to the printed object and its authorship or engraving, not to Reger as an artist. Anyone researching this name should confirm which historical or contemporary figure is meant, since "Reger" is shared by an unrelated composer and by a living academic, and none of the three has been shown by available sources to share auction-market history with the others.