The shuttered, musty, little shop stood on the edge of the canal, next to the sumptuous guild of the moneylenders. On its lintel was the cryptic legend, "speak of nothing but business, and speak quickly. To the merchant-princes of the guild, who saw it in passing, it might have seemed like the humble bootleg of a cobbler. Not the most fortunate of them would know that within it countries of the mind were being discovered, vaster than the lands toward which another Italian was sailing in the same year. Entering, he would have found the flower of Venetian scholarship gathered about a table. On it a skillful craftsman was laboriously fashioning little blocks of metal into the forms of graceful letters, using a manuscript of Petrarch's for his model. What conversation he heard would be unintelligible to him, for these men spoke of business not in volatile Italian but in the old tongue of Pindar and Plato.

It was the work of many days and many men before the new type was fashioned and set up on the printing board, to spell out the fable of Hero and Leander, salvaged by the keepers of the shop from the attic of a monastery. And there is no one today who can measure the sense of high adventure with which the Venetian scholars and printers saw the heavy paper take the delicate print of the metal, the Greek myth rescued and restored by the ingenuity of the early Renaissance.

The labored process of casting words into metal had come to Italy years before, but it was the inspiration of Aldo Manucci which made it a characteristic art of the Renaissance. From the medleval scribesmen, from the letters of Petrarch, he devised the beautiful type which even today is reserved for the greatest books. From the scribesmen also he took the manuscripts on which for centuries they had been perpetuating the classics: he printed them with copious and cloquent notes, and scattered them throughout the libraries of Italy. Out of these the artists of the Renaissance took the sudden vision and the new ideal which made them famous.

Mr. Winship will lecture on the printing of the Renaissance in the Treasure Room of Widener today at 11 o'clock.

TODAY

10 o'clock

"The March Revolution (1917.)," Mr. Vernadsky, Boylston 21.

"Martial," Professor Rand, Sever 13.

"Renan-Taine," Professor Morize, Emerson 211.