Sachs
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Sachs. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
saks, Hans (1494-1576), a German poet of Nuremberg. His father was a tailor. He himself was bred to the craft of shoemaking in his youth. He traveled from one German city to another, attending the literary and musical meetings of the Meistersingers. As a lad he received some little education, including lessons in Latin grammar. In early manhood he settled down to the shoemaker's bench. He was a leading spirit in the local association of Meistersingers. By composing continually at his bench he pounded out an immense amount of poetry. While not of high literary order it abounds in humor and good practical sense, somewhat after the style of Benjamin Franklin. One catalog of his productions includes 4,275 songs, 208 comedies and tragedies, 1,700 tales, dialogues, proverbs, and fables, and 73 hymns. Five large folio volumes were required to contain his writings. He appears to have been a prosperous, contented man. He was twice married and had five sons and two daughters. His grave may be seen in the quaint old churchyard of St. John's in Nuremberg. Whittier had no little admiration for the old German shoemaker. Thy songs, Hans Sachs, are living yet, In strong and hearty German. --The Shoemakers.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HANS, the most distinguished meistersinger of Germany in the 16th HANS SACHS century, born in Nuremberg, Germany, Nov. 5, 1494. He learned the trade of a shoemaker, commenced business in his native city, married (1519), and prospered. He took lessons under one of the chief meistersingers of Nuremberg, and soon surpassed all his contemporaries. As a staunch follower of Luther, and an ardent advocate of his teachings, Sachs succeeded in imparting to his hymns a fervor which considerably aided the spread of the Reformation. A bronze statue in his memory was erected in 1874 at Nuremberg, where his house may still be seen. He died in Nuremberg, Jan. 19, 1576. SACK (Spanish, seco; French, sec, "dry"), formerly a general name for the different sorts of dry wines, more especially the Spanish, which were first extensively used in England in the 16th century. Also a measure or weight, varying accor ing according to the article and country Also a term applied to the plundering of a town or city.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The biographical facts Aiton's set out in 1910 and Collier's in 1921 still stand: Sachs was born in Nuremberg in 1494, worked as a shoemaker, led the city's Meistersinger guild, and left a body of work usually counted at more than 6,000 pieces, including the 1523 poem The Wittenberg Nightingale that did much to spread Luther's cause. What Collier's could not foresee is what happened to the physical Nuremberg it pointed to: the house it said may still be seen was lost when the old city was bombed in 1945, though the bronze statue erected in 1874 survives on the square that bears his name. The other large change is in reputation rather than fact, since Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg made Sachs a national symbol, and the Nazi party's use of both the opera and the city has left later readers handling that symbolism far more warily than a 1921 editor would have. Read as a life, the entries need almost no correction.
Written for this edition, 2026.