In Augsburg Gunther Zainer has some initial I's of strap-work without foliation: they are finely designed, but gain considerably when, as sometimes happens, the spaces between the straps are filled in with fine pen-tracery and in yellowish brown; they were cut early in Gunther's career, as one occurs in the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, c. 1471, and another in the Calendar, printed 1471. These, as they always occur in the margin and are long, may be called border-pieces. A border occurring in Eyb, ob einem manne tzu nemen ein weib is drawn very gracefully in outline, and is attached, deftly enough, to a very good S of the pen-letter type, though on a separate block; it has three shields of arms in it, one of which is the bearing of Augsburg. This piece is decidedly illuminators' work as to design.
Gunther's Margarita Davidica has a border (attached to a very large P) which is much like the Ulm borders in character. A genealogical tree of the House of Hapsburg prefacing the Spiegel des Menschlichen lebens, and occupying a whole page, is comparable for beauty and elaboration to the S of John Zainer above mentioned; on the whole, for beauty and richness of invention and for neatness of execution, I am inclined to give it the first place amongst all the decorative pieces of the German printers.
Gunther Zainer's German Bible of c. 1474 has a full set of pictured letters, one to every book, of very remarkable merit: the foliated forms which make the letters and enclose the figures being bold, inventive, and very well drawn. I note that these excellent designs have received much less attention than they deserve.
In almost all but the earliest of Gunther's books a handsome set of initials are used, a good deal like the above mentioned Ulm initials, but with the foliations blunter, and blended with less of geometrical forms: the pen origin of these is also very marked.
Ludwig Hohenwang, who printed at Augsburg in the seventies, uses a noteworthy set of initials, alluded to above, that would seem to have been drawn by the designer with a twelfth century MS. before him, though, as a matter of course, the fifteenth century betrays itself in certain details, chiefly in the sharp foliations at the ends of the scrolls, etc. There is a great deal of beautiful design in these letters; but the square border round them, while revealing their origin from illuminators' work, leaves over-large whites in the backgrounds, which call out for the completion that the illuminator's colour would have given them. Bämler and the later printer Sorg do not use so much ornament as Gunther Zainer; their initials are less rich both in line and design than Gunther's, and Sorg's especially have a look of having run down from the earlier ones: in his Seusse, however, there are some beautiful figured initials designed on somewhat the same plan as those of Gunther Zainer's Bible.