Patti Smith Books In Order

Woolgathering

The National Book Award winner Patti Smith presents a treasure box of a childhood memoir about clear unspeakable joy and just the wish to know. A great book about becoming an artist, Woolgathering tells of a youngster finding herself as she learns the noble vocation of Woolgathering, a worthy calling that seemed a good job for me. She discovers often at night, often in nature the pleasures of rescuing a fleeting thought. Deeply moving, Wool gathering calls up our own memories, as the child glimpses and gleans, piecing together a crazy quilt of truths. Smith introduces us to her tribe, a race of cloud dwellers, and to the fierce, vital pleasures of cloud watching and stargazing and wandering. A radiant new autobiographical piece, Two Worlds which was not in the original 1992 Hanuman edition of Woolgathering, and the author’s photographs and illustrations are also included. Woolgathering celebrates the sacred nature of creation with Smith s beautiful style, acclaimed as glorious NPR, spellbinding Booklist, rare and ferocious Salon, and shockingly beautiful New York Magazine. Black and white illustrations

The Coral Sea

A collection of lyrical writings provides a tribute to the author’s enduring friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe and describes the late artist’s coming of age, relationship with Sam Wagstaff, and battle with AIDS.

Auguries of Innocence

Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.

Early Work, 1970-1979

The poet, songwriter, and performer evokes the experimentation and longing of the pre punk days in a collection of poems and prose culled from her previously published works, Seventh Heaven, Ha! Ha! Houdini! Witt, and Babel.

Patti Smith Complete Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future

Described by her critics alternately as the ‘godmother of punk’ and ‘rock and roll’s poet laureate,’ Patti Smith is an American original. Her first album, Horses, was a landmark album of power, bravado, beauty, and grace. Its famous cover portrait, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘was the first to claim both vision and authority,’ wrote Camille Paglia. ‘No female rocker had ever dominated an image in this aggressive, uncompromising way.’Seven albums later, and a life punctuated by a long hiatus during which Smith raised her two children and suffered the tragic losses of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, her dear friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, and her beloved brother, Smith is ready to mark her first fifty years on the planet with a book her fans have long awaited: the complete lyrics. With never before seen photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Liebovitz, Kate Simon, and others, plus original artwork and text by Smith, Patti Smith Complete is a living commemoration of Smith’s unique contribution to music and the empowerment of people through her message of work, love, and charity.

Strange Messenger (With: David Greenberg)

Impossible to categorize, moving easily between the literary, art, and musical worlds, always unpredictable and impassioned, idiosyncratic musician and artist Patti Smith here presents an impressive body of visual art, mostly works on paper. Bringing together approximately 60 works spanning the past 30 years, Strange Messenger collects early pieces as well as new ones inspired by the September 11, 2001, bombing of the World Trade Center, in which Smith expresses her views about violence, religion, war, and intolerance. This book marks the first occasion that Smith’s drawings have been brought together in a single volume, as well as the first publication of most of the included works. Rumpled, tattered, unkempt, hirsute, Patti Smith defies the rules of femininity. Soulful, haggard and emaciated yet raffish, swaggering and seductive, she is mad saint, dandy and troubadour, a complex woman alone and outward bound for culture war. Camille Paglia

Edited by John W. Smith.
Essays by David Greenberg and John W. Smith.

Paperback, 6.5 x 9 in., 80 pages, 50 color 6 b/w illustrations

Trois

A set of three personal books by an icon of the New York underground music scene. Published on the occasion of Patti Smith’s exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, here are three books devoted to her artistic world, combined in a set entitled Trois. Charleville encompas*ses Smith’s texts, drawings, and photographs revolving around the figure of Arthur Rimbaud and collected over a period of almost forty years. Photographies showcases her photographs of sculptures taken between 2002 and 2008 and accompanied by her poems. Cahier is a notebook inspired by those belonging to Patti Smith. The first pages are filled with her handwriting and the rest is left to the reader’s personal use. The set perfectly reflects Patti Smith’s long standing interest in literature, photography, and all kinds of artistic expression. 150 illustrations.

Just Kids

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max’s Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists’ ascent, a prelude to fame.

Images (By:David Lynch)

A collection of the controversial film director’s private paintings, photographs, and fiction, made public here for the first time, offers a new glimpse into the disturbed, perverse imagination behind such movies as Blue Velvet.

David Lynch: Snowmen (By:David Lynch)

As his Spring, 2007 Cartier Foundation retrospective, The Air Is On Fire, made plain to all who saw it, the talents of the great American filmmaker David Lynch reach far beyond his acknowledged achievements in cinema: he is also an excellent painter, draughtsman and photographer. His photography to date has fallen loosely into four distinct genres or series: nudes Bacon esque images of digitally distorted Victorian photographs, still lifes spark plugs, dental machinery, industrial landscapes and snowmen. Published to accompany the Cartier show, this compact volume brings together Lynch’s black and white photographs of snowmen, all taken in the suburbs of his hometown of Boise, Idaho. Exhibiting his characteristic preoccupation with ominous beauty as these ephemeral folk sculptures decompose in front of snow covered tract houses, Lynch pays scant regard to the cheerier and more genial properties of snowmen, and indeed some of these images will remind viewers of the shadowy black and white tones of Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead. ‘If you have some shadow or darkness in the frame, then your mind can travel in there and dream,’ he has stated. Lynch’s indisputable gift for teasing out the sinister flipsides of the props and rituals of American suburbia is beautifully evidenced in this small, gift worthy book.

David Lynch: The Air is on Fire (By:David Lynch)

The first major collection of artwork by the acclaimed movie director David Lynch. Spanning a period of forty years, David Lynch’s widely respected films and television series include Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. However, his prolific visual art production, which began even before his films, has rarely been seen. This catalogue of his artistic output, published on the occasion of a large scale exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, covers a wide variety of disciplines: painting, photography, drawings, sculpture, furniture, music, and ‘moving pictures.’ His art echoes his films in theme and aesthetic, yet offers viewers a fresh and more intimate glimpse into his singular universe. The book also contains several essays that analyze his artworks, as well as a conversation with Lynch, interviewed within the context of the show. 469 illustrations in color.

David Lynch: Dark Splendor (By:David Lynch,Peter-Klaus Schuster,Dietmar Dath)

Parallel to the film career for which he is justly admired, David Lynch born 1946 has always worked as an artist, having trained in painting at the Corcoran School of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the mid 1960s. Lynch’s photographs, paintings, prints, drawings, and more recently, musical compositions, are an indispensable part of his oeuvre and frequently a source of inspiration for his films. Fans of such classics as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive will readily conjure the director’s keen eye for lush but menacing neo Surrealist tableaux, for instance, which are directly nourished by his artworks. Other hallmarks of the Lynchian style, such as cryptic messages and inscriptions, foreboding atmospherics and a famously left field sense of humor likewise appear in the paintings, drawings and photographs collected in David Lynch: Dark Splendor a landmark publication that reveals the breadth and accomplishment of his work in this realm. It contains such marvels as his matchbook drawings pen and ink images of shrouded dreamscapes and interiors, inscribed on the inside of matchbooks his wonderfully foreboding lithographs, in which scrawled captions jostle among murky figures, his photographs of industrial wastelands and his sinister paintings that incorporate materials and objects to further advance their gothic appeal. Dark Splendor presents these works in excellent reproductions, and will seduce fans of contemporary film and art alike.