When guitar legend Tom Verlaine died in 2023 at age 73, he left behind one of the more quietly remarkable personal archives in New York music history. Now, part of that archive is going public.
Discogs is partnering with Brooklyn record store Academy Records, which acquired Verlaine's collection, for a public sale of roughly 4,000 records. According to Rolling Stone, 1,000 records will go on sale online at Discogs on Friday, June 26, the first of four waves. An in-store sale will take place at Academy Records in Brooklyn on July 10 and 11. The final online drop is set for July 31.
Verlaine defined a particular strand of New York avant-garde rock with his band Television in the 1970s, helping to ignite the CBGB punk scene. Songs like Marquee Moon and Breakin' In My Heart shaped how a generation heard the electric guitar.
Those who knew him describe a man equally devoted to collecting as he was to playing. Verlaine was a regular presence at the sidewalk carts outside the Strand Bookstore and amassed a 50,000-volume book collection in his apartment. After his death, sales of that book collection, held across two Brooklyn garages, drew large crowds well beyond the usual music circles.
His friend and fellow guitarist Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth described the ritual of their shared hunts for books and records. "We would go book-shopping together," Moore told Rolling Stone via Zoom from London. "I was living up in Northampton, Massachusetts, for close to a decade, and he would come up and spend weekends up there, him and [artist, scholar, and partner] Jutta [Koether]. He and I would take off together in his rental car and we'd go to all the secondhand bookstores of western Massachusetts. We did the rounds."
Moore also recalled visiting Verlaine's apartment in New York. "I went up to his apartment a couple of times," he said. "It was definitely a very intimate zone. Jutta lived in the same building, but in a separate apartment, because the books didn't allow for more than one person to be living in there."
The record collection reflects a listener rather than a curator. Russ Ryan of Discogs told Rolling Stone that the range and pricing of the collection makes it accessible. "It's a collection that was built by Tom Verlaine's ear, in his lifetime," Ryan said. "They're records that represent his love of music from all over the spectrum."
Ryan added that the collection is not built around trophies. The median record is priced around $15, with most falling between $10 and $50, and the range extending up to $1,000. That pricing structure means casual fans can participate alongside serious collectors.
The first online drop at Discogs goes live June 26.
