In Germany good work began early, because, to supply the demand for playing-cards and pictures of saints, schools of wood-cutters had grown up, more especially at Augsburg and at Ulm. Block-books also had come into existence in the district of the lower Rhine, and these, which in their earliest forms can hardly be later than 1460, must be divided between the Low Countries and Germany and prove the existence of competent workmen. The earliest type-printed books which possess illustrations are the little handful printed by Albrecht Pfister at Bamberg in and about 1461, described in Chapter V, but it was at Augsburg in the early seventies that book-illustration first flourished. As has been mentioned in Chapter V, trade difficulties at first stood in the way, but by the arbitration of Melchior Stanheim, abbot of the local monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra, these were settled on the sensible basis that printers might have as many illustrations in their books as they chose to provide, but that they must be designed and cut by Augsburg craftsmen. The series seems to have begun with some tolerably good column-cuts to an edition of the Lives of the Saints in German, of which the first part was issued in October, 1471, and the second in April, 1472. In _Das guldin spiel_ of a Dominican writer, Ingold, finished on 1 August of the latter year, we find for the first time real power of characterization. Lovers of woodcuts owe some gratitude to the medieval trick of attaching edifying discourses to matters of everyday interest and amusement, for whereas the edifying discourses themselves could hardly carry illustrations, hunting, chess, or, as here, seven games which could be likened to the seven deadly sins, gave opportunities for showing pictures by which the natural man would be attracted. Another important book of this year, only known to me in Bamler's plagiarism of it, was the first edition of the _Belial_, the amazing book which tells the story of Christ being summoned for the trespass committed in harrowing Hell.