its out of an endowment. Aldus had to
organize his own selling system, his advertising had to be largely by
private correspondence with scholars and book-sellers throughout Europe
laboriously composed with his own hand; yet it was imperative that the
business become as soon as possible self-supporting, or at least that
losses in one quarter should be recouped by profits in another.

It was in his edition of Virgil, 1501, that Aldus first employed the new
cursive or sloping letter which later came to be known in English
printing as italic type. According to tradition he copied it closely
from the handwriting of the Italian poet Petrarch. The type was very
compact, covering many more words on a page than the roman of that day,
and was used as a body type, not as in our day for isolated words and
phrases set apart for emphasis or other distinction from the rest of the
text. Aldus also, though not the first to cast Greek type, gave his
Greek fonts an elegance which was soon imitated, like the italic, by
other printers. By the introduction of small types which were at the
same time legible, and by adopting for his classical texts a small
format suitable for pocket-size books, Aldus invented the modern small
book. No longer was it necessary for a scholar to rest a heavy folio on
a table in order to read; he might carry with him on a journey half a
dozen of these beautiful little books in no more space than a single
volume of the older printers. Furthermore, his prices were low. The
pocket editions or small octavos sold for about two lire, or forty cents
in the money of that day, the purchasing power of which in modern money
is estimated at not above two dollars.

This popularizing of literature and of classical learning did not meet
with universal favor amongst his countrymen. We read of one Italian who
warned Aldus that if he kept on spreading Italian scholarship beyond the
Alps at nominal prices the outer barbarians would no longer come to
Italy to study Greek, but would stay at home and read their Aldine
editions without adding a penny to the income of Italian cities. Such a
fear was not unfounded, for the poorer scholars of Germany and the
Netherlands did actually find that they could stay at home and get for a
few francs the ripest results of Italian and Greek scholarship. This
gave Aldus no concern; if he could render international services to
learning, if he could help to set up among the humbler scholars of other
lan