Literary Archive of Television's Tom Verlaine Acquired By The New York Public Library
Television in a 1977 publicity photo by Roberta Bayley promoting their debut album Marquee Moon on Elektra Records. Left to right: Billy Ficca, Richard Lloyd, Tom Verlaine, and Fred Smith.
An archive spanning six decades of Tom Verlaine’s working life including lyric drafts, handwritten notebooks, short stories, correspondence, and hundreds of hours of unreleased music by the Neon Boys, Television, and solo work has been acquired by The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Verlaine (born Thomas Joseph Miller), who died in 2023 aged 73, was a poet and New York celebrity primarily known as the frontman for the influential band Television.
In a letter to the Library, Patti Smith wrote: “It is impossible to speak of Tom Verlaine without giving prominence to his deep relationship with books. It was through a shared passion for books that we forged an enduring friendship, collecting volumes on everything from poems of Rumi, French literature, ufology, detective novels, to mystical and spiritual literature. We spent hours in used bookstores and loved the Public Library. I well remember mounting those steps with him and whistling a hello to Patience and Fortitude, the library’s magnificent guardian lions."
The archive includes 145 personal notebooks and journals and an early 1970s lyric drafts for Television's track Marquee Moon from its 1977 debut album of the same name.
“Tom Verlaine was an artist inspired by literature, and the musicians and artists around him so, we feel that the Library for the Performing Arts is a perfect home for his archive,” said Roberta Pereira, Barbara G. and Lawrence A. Fleischman Executive Director of the Library for the Performing Arts.
Emerging in the early 1970s, Television played at the vanguard of the emerging punk and new wave scene that centered around the legendary CBGB club. After the brief lifespan of the original run of the band, Television reformed in 1992 and toured until Verlaine’s death.
The Library for the Performing Arts and its Music and Recorded Sound Division also holds the archives of musicians including Lou Reed, John Cage, Lesley Gore, Arthur Russell, and Wayne Shorter.
