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.

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