ICYMI: Tom Verlaine’s Downtown legacy enters the New York Public Library

Image via NYPL 

On Jan. 9, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts announced that it has acquired the archive of Tom Verlaine, the musician, poet and longtime New York presence best known as the frontman of Television. 

The collection spans roughly six decades of Verlaine's working life and fills about 40 linear feet. It includes lyric drafts, short stories, abandoned songs, correspondence, photographs, ephemera, and hundreds of hours of released and unreleased recordings — demos, rehearsals, and live material from the Neon Boys, Television, and Verlaine's solo years. 

Among the highlights: early 1970s handwritten lyric drafts for Marquee Moon and 145 personal notebooks and journals. 

Verlaine, a longtime East Villager who died in 2023 at age 73, emerged in the early 1970s as a central figure in the downtown scene orbiting CBGB. Television's 1977 debut, Marquee Moon, is widely regarded as one of the most influential rock albums ever released. Though commercial success largely eluded him, Verlaine's angular guitar style and literary sensibility left a deep mark on generations of artists. 

In a letter to the library, Patti Smith reflected on Verlaine's lifelong love of books and their shared hours in used bookstores, calling the New York Public Library "a more fitting place" for his papers. Library officials say the archive will help spark long-overdue scholarship on Verlaine's work and legacy. 

The collection now joins holdings connected to figures such as Lou Reed, John Cage and Arthur Russell at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which is located at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza ... within the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex.

[Updated] The archives of The East Village Eye now at the New York Public Library

The archives of the East Village Eye, the legendary magazine published from 1979 to 1987 that covered the arts, politics and social currents of the neighborhood at the time, have a new home at the New York Public Library. 

From the Eye's website: 

After numerous discussions and negotiations with the world's leading research institutions, we are thrilled to announce that the East Village Eye archive, consisting of documents, manuscripts, artworks, videos, ephemera and a complete run of the original printed publication, has been acquired by the New York Public Library.

And via editor-publisher Leonard Abrams: 

NYPL's acquisition of the East Village Eye archive is the perfect outcome of our years-long search for the best home for these materials. I can't think of another institution with the breadth and depth of interest, the institutional strength and the dedication to the common good that compares to the New York Public Library – not to mention where it lives. New York deserves to keep this essential trove of materials. It covers a time when it wasn't always easy to love New York City, but we always knew how important it was to bring these voices to the public and to preserve them, even if it meant dragging them from one storage space to another for some 35 years. 

There's a detailed piece about all this at The New Yorker, via writer Hannah Gold ... here's a passage with NYPL curator Julie Golia: 

Golia explained to us what would happen next: when the library acquires a collection, it is inspected for pests and water damage. When necessary, materials are isolated and treated in the Disaster Recovery room. Once they've been cleared, the collection moves into the archival-processing queue and the items are rehoused in acid-free folders and boxes. 

The library's staff begins to make the finding aid, essentially an index of the collection. This inventorying can be time-consuming, depending on the scale of the collection, which can vary widely — the Eye archive arrived in fewer than twenty containers, which is relatively small. The library's New Yorker archive, on the other hand, is stored in more than two thousand containers. 

Golia says the East Village Eye archives will arrive at the basement stacks in about a year. The finding aid will go live on the N.Y.P.L.'s Web site, and researchers will officially be able to view the materials. 

As Golia explained the process, Abrams was visibly moved, yet characteristically irreverent. "I don't care what order they’re in!" he insisted, when Golia told us it was library policy to preserve the way donors had grouped their own collections. "Leonard organized them in a certain way, because that's the way his mind worked, and part of what we're trying to preserve is the way his mind works." Abrams waved his hands dismissively, the journalist both flattered and uncomfortable with attention turned his way. Before we left the library's processing center, he had a question: Would they let him throw a party? 

Updated 3/13 ... the party has been rescheduled for March 23... there's a celebration of this union coming up on March 2 with The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at Bowery Electric and other guests...

Previously on EV Grieve:
Q-and-A with Leonard Abrams, publisher of the East Village Eye

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