Fresh Print Some new books to please the avid reader: Patti Smith is an icon and a touchstone for hundreds of thousands of us… from the arrival of “Horses” in 1975 to the 2010 release of her memoir, Just Kids, and her HSBG appearance that same year, and the many stops along the way… In 1992, a talismanic little book bearing her name and called Woolgathering appeared on the counter at places like City Lights & Moe’s, on cafe tables at the Trieste, in squalid rooms at the Chelsea Hotel… places where the tribe tended to gather to muse, to share a meal, to conceive of new modes of expression… Woolgathering was one in a series of small (3″x4″) handmade books put out by Raymond Foye & Francesco Clemente’s Hanuman Books, printed at Kalakshetra, near Madras (now Chennai), India, under the supervision of George Scrivani.  Like Patti herself, the gem-like…

Fresh Print Some new books to please the avid reader: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Goldblatt. In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt (Will in the World) turns his attention to the beginning of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture’s foundation: the free questioning of truth. It hinges on the recovery of an ancient philosophical Latin text that had been neglected for a thousand years. In the winter of 1417 Italian oddball humanist, smutty humorist, and apostolic secretary Poggio Bracciolini stumbled on Lucretius’ De rerum natura. In an obscure monastery in southern Germany lay the recovery of a philosophy free of superstition and dogma. Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things harkened back to the mostly lost works of Greek philosophers known as atomists. Lucretius himself was essentially an Epicurean who saw the restrained seeking of pleasure as…