Zainer's most striking success was achieved by his edition of Steinhöwel's version of the Life and Fables of Æsop, of which no less than eleven editions were printed in various German towns before the end of the century, for the most part closely copied from the Ulm original. In this, there are altogether two hundred woodcuts, eleven of which belong to the story of Sigismund at the end of the book. The frontispiece is a large picture of Æsop,
who, here and throughout the chapters devoted to his imaginary 'life,' is represented as a knavish clown, a variant of Eulenspiegel or Marcolphus. Some of the illustrations to the fables are very good, notably those of the Sower and the Birds, the Huntsman, and King Stork, here reproduced from Sorg's reprint. The Æsop and the Boccaccio De Claris Mulieribus give Johann Zainer a high place among the German printers of illustrated books. His other work was unimportant and mostly imitative. His types are much smaller than those used in the early Augsburg books, and his initials less heavy and massive. They are not more than an inch high, and consist of a simple outline overlaid with jagged work.
In 1482, Leonhard Holl printed at Ulm an edition of Ptolemy's Cosmographia, which contains the first woodcut map and fine initial letters, one of which, showing the editor, Nicolaus Germanus, presenting his book to the Pope, is given as a [frontispiece to this chapter]. In 1483 he issued the first of many editions of the Buch der Weisheit der alten Menschen von Anbeginn der Welt. The wisdom of the ancients chiefly takes the form of fables, which are illustrated with cuts, larger but much less artistic than those of Zainer's Æsop. From Conrad Dinkmuth we have the first illustrated editions of three notable works, the Seelenwurzgarten, or 'Garden of the Soul' (1483), Thomas Lirar's Schwäbische Chronik (1486), and the Eunuchus of Terence (1486). This last is
illustrated with fourteen remarkable woodcuts, over five inches by seven in size, and each occupying about three-fourths of a page. The scene is mostly laid in a street, and there is some attempt at perspective in the vista of houses. The figures of the characters are fairly good, but not above the average Ulm work of the time. Two later Ulm books, written by Gulielmus Caoursin and printed by Johann Reger in 1496, are of great interest, one giving the Stabilimenta or ordinances, of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the other an account of the successful defence of Rhodes by its knights against the Turks. Both are richly illustrated with woodcuts of very considerable artistic merit.
At Lübeck in 1475 Lucas Brandis printed, as his first book, a notable edition of the Rudimentum Noviciorum, an epitome of history, sacred and profane, during the six ages of the world. The epitome is epitomised at the beginning of the book by ten pages of cuts, mostly of circles linked together by chains, and bearing the name of some historical character. Into the space left by these circles are introduced pictures of the world's history from the Creation and the Flood down to the life of Christ, which is told in a series of nine cuts on the last page. The first page of the text is surrounded, except at the top, by a border in three pieces, into one section of which are introduced birds, and into another a blank shield supported by two lions. The inner margin of the first page of text bears a fine figure of a
man reading a scroll, and the two columns are separated by a spiral of leaves climbing round a stick. The cuts in the text are partly repeated from the preliminary pages, partly new, though extreme economy is shown in their use, one figure of a philosopher standing for at least twenty different sages. The large initial letters at the beginning of the various books have scenes introduced into them, the little battle-piece in the Q of the 'Quinta aetas' being the most remarkable. Altogether this is a very splendid and noteworthy book, and one which Brandis never equalled in his later work.