The collection began to take shape in the 1970s, and by the early 1980s it had become a working instrument for a single, systematic quest. Staikos set out to gather every printed book that could illuminate the publishing path Greeks had taken from the years of the Italian Renaissance onward, wherever in the world those books were made. It is a collector's library in the truest sense, assembled not to be comprehensive about everything but exhaustive about one thing: the moment when Greek letters, newly set in movable type, began to circulate through Europe and shape the rebirth of classical learning.

Behind the books lies a story the collection was built to tell. When the great Italian humanists hungered for the wisdom of ancient Greece, it was often Greek scholars who supplied it, men who taught the language and edited the texts, and whose pupils included some of the leading minds of the Italian Renaissance. The library was meant to demonstrate that contribution and the relationships those scholars cultivated with the humanists of Italy. Exhibitions drawn from the collection, accompanied by detailed bilingual catalogues, traveled abroad, including to the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice in 1993, carrying that argument to the very cities where the books were first printed.

The space itself was designed by Staikos, the same hand that shaped the collection shaping the place that holds it. The stacks were built in the spirit of stable, enduring structures, finished in oak that gives the interior its weight and warmth. The books are arranged by theme, and the section names sketch the intellectual map of the collection: Renaissance and Humanism, Neo-Hellenic Literature, Liturgical Books, Travel Literature, Treatises of Theology, the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment. Most of the volumes came off presses in Venice, the great early center of Greek printing, or from other publishers who served readers of Greek across the diaspora.

This is not a place you wander into between sights. The Hellenic Library is not open to the public, and organized visits take place by appointment only. That restraint suits its character. A collection this focused, housed in rooms designed around it, is closer to a scholar's private study than a public reading room, a quiet repository where the long story of Greek printing is preserved on oak shelves a short walk from the Acropolis, waiting for the few who come looking for it.