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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Stephen Greenblatt.

He's written a book called The Swerve, How the World Became Modern.

And it is about that moment in the Renaissance when things were never going to be the same,

largely because a book hunter seeking antiquities in the monastery libraries where you could

still find manuscripts had found Dererum Natura

by Lucretius and really what follows is the Renaissance as we know it. Tell me how you first found

Lucretius. Michael, I first found Lucretius in a much less romantic way. I was an

undergraduate at Yale. I went at the end of the year, as I usually did, to the campus

bookstore to see what books were on sale for next to nothing. And I was rummaging through a

bin and saw that for 10 cents I could buy a copy of a poem I had never heard of by someone I had

never heard of. Lucretius is on the nature of things. I was attracted to it because it had a cover

designed by Max Ernst, the surrealist painter.

It showed two pairs of legs, disembodied legs up in the sky, doing something unusual.

And I thought, oh, this is an interesting cover, and it would be worth a 10 cent investment.

...