See No Evil (Books)

Tom Verlaine was an incredibly cerebral dude and was way deep in (heh heh heh) with Patti Smith who also worked at The Strand in her youth, so I guess it shouldn't be a huge surprise that the late Television guitar genius owned over 50,000 books which prompted a huge book sale of interest:

Over the years he had acquired fifty thousand books – twenty tons or more – on any number of subjects: art, acoustics, astrological signs, UFOs. The sale of those books – a two-day affair in August, run out of adjacent garages in Brooklyn – was a serious draw. Arto Lindsay, the avant-pop musician, walked by. Tony Oursler made a short video and posted it on Instagram. Old friends, some of whom looked as if they hadn’t seen daylight in decades, found each other in the long line.

His record collection will go on sale, one of these days, at the Academy Record annexes in Greenpoint and the East Village. They’re a reminder of different days in a different city, where the bookstores and record stores stayed open late, and you could poke around in them even after a night out at CBGB, and the stuff that you’d get there was cheap, and the space that you needed to store it was cheap, and, even if you worked in a bookstore, you could afford an offset press and start your own poetry imprint, or find a loft space in SoHo and start your own band.

Ironically of course Television bandmate & punk rock avatar Richard Hell was always seen as the "literary" "poet" "words guy" of the group and I read one of his books back in the 1990s and it was such an unbelievably pompous pile of shit I couldn't put it down (or back up again), so 🤷‍♂️

SIDE NOTE: I love how for this garage sale photo instead of having a rock glamour photo of the iconic Verlaine they're like "hey here's a picture of the outside of some nondescript apartment building somewhere!"