The NYPL has acquired Tom Verlaine’s archive. Which other rock stars live on at the library?

Patience and Fortitude have a new, freaky playmate. Tom Verlaine, the late livewire best known as frontman for the proto-punk band Television, has left his remaining archive to the NYPL.

According to Fine Books & Collections, six decades of Verlaine material “including lyric drafts, handwritten notebooks, short stories, correspondence, and hundreds of hours of unreleased music” will soon be housed at the Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. These treasures stand separate from Verlaine’s massive personal library, which went on sale to the public in 2023.

In a letter to the library, Verlaine’s old friend Patti Smith framed this as a most suitable get.

“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,” she wrote. “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.”

Verlaine’s works are joining friends. The Lou Reed papers can also be found—via onsite request—at the Library for Performing Arts. Ditto the diaries of Jim Carroll, former downtown fixture and author of The Basketball Diaries.

Patti Smith’s unpublished poems are sitting pretty in the Manuscripts & Archives division, midtown. And elsewhere between the lions, Arthur Russell fans can make an appointment to listen to the Rough Trade tapes—excerpts from his never completed works in progress. That’s if your a rockist with a 70s-80s specialty.

Though restrictions apply, rock and jazz generalists can spelunk the collections of George Avakian, the power producer/manager/exec behind Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, Keith Jarrett, and Sonny Rollins.

And uptown, at the Schomburg Center, hip hop heads can look through music journalist and former Def Jam publicist Bill Adler’s archives, which include recordings, “cover art, books, films, videos, photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, publicity materials, and other advertising” spanning the genre’s heyday. If you’re more of a visual learner, you can request to see the original graphic art for De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising. Or peep photos from Fab 5 Freddy.

Anyway. Consider this a nice reminder, fans, nerds, set dressers, designers, and anyone inclined to write about or reflect on musicians in previous New Yorks. Take a trip uptown and get your mind blown, on the state’s dime.

The real rock star is always the library.