Hell Lit
Hell Writings In Print
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Hot and Cold "essays poems lyrics notebooks pictures fiction" by Hell
(New York: powerHouse, 2001) 6.25" x 10" 256 pp. hardbound 1st edition signed by Hell $50.00 (book is out of print and available new only here at the site)
Hot and Cold was originally to be published by small press Vehicle Editions (Ancram, NY), which did bring out a 32 pp. "preview edition" in 1998 to coincide with Hell's art show at the Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery in New York, but when Vehicle ran out of money, the trendy artbook publisher powerHouse Books (website) took on the project. It's an arrangement of all Richard's best writing (and graphics) that had been previously unavailable in book form: nonfiction (essays), poetry (1969 to 2001), lyrics (to every song he wrote the words to that exists in a circulated recording up to 2001), notebooks (1988-98), drawings (and some photos), and fiction that is presented in such a way that it not only stands as interesting work, but serves as a kind of (sub-)cultural history of the era that punk triggered. Here's a page of excerpts from the book, as well as a listing of the entire contents of it, and a larger view of its black dust jacket. PLEASE NOTE: The publication price was $29.95 and used copies at other online dealers are at least $50.00, many priced much higher, but we're offering exclusively signed copies and adding protective mylar dust-jacket wrappers at this special author's website price. The book is the heaviest weight--nearly 2 lbs.--of any of our merchandise, making Priority Flat Rate the least expensive way to ship it, which for this is $9.85 minimum. Nevertheless we're offering it Priority (to arrive in 2-3 days), including packing/packaging/PayPal percentage/and P.O. line-waiting, for $9. ISBN 1-57687-082-0
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The Voidoid Hell's 1973 novelina illustrated by Kier Cooke Sandvik
(New York: 38th Street Publishers, 2009) 5.5" x 8.5" 121 pp. paperback $18.00
The Voidoid is a delerious, desolate, and real funny piece of short fiction. It's still among Hell's favorites of his writings, and it reeks of its whacked out early '70s NY "barnyard slum" rock & roll/poetry milieu. In the afterword to the 1996 Codex edition, Richard wrote: "The Voidoid was written in 1973 in a little furnished room on East 10th Street. I was staying with Jennifer ('my thoughts and me are like ships that pass in the night') in her apartment down the block overlooking the graveyard at St. Mark's Church. The Neon Boys was stalled because we couldn't find a second guitar player... Every day I'd take a cheap bottle of wine with me across the street to the $16-a-week room I'd rented for writing. The method was I'd keep going till I got to the end of a single-spaced page, which was pretty far. I'd wake up an hour later and have to drink a lot of water..." What sets this edition apart is the perfect illustrations--24 drawings done especially for the book by young Norwegian artist Kier Cooke Sandvik (as well as a few choice photographs added by Hell).You can see sample page spreads as well as the first chapter of the book. ISBN 978-0-9818369-6-6
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The Toilet Paper Columns 14 newsmonthly columns
(New York: CUZ Editions, 2007) 8.5" x 11" 31 pp. paperback 1st edition $12.95
The Toilet Paper Columns collects the fourteen columns Richard wrote for Noel Black's now-defunct Colorado Springs, CO alternative monthly. Noel's idea was to start a radically funny and anti-conservative free paper to be placed for the taking in local restrooms. Hence the title. Or maybe the title came first. Anyway he insisted against all argument on calling his publication that. It lasted for seventeen issues, Oct 2004-May 2006. It missed some months and Hell missed some issues. Some of the subjects Richard devotes columns to are: the matter of digestive processes (as suggested by the new monthly's name), the series of recent original-"punk" musicians' deaths (Robert Quine, three Ramones, Joe Strummer, etc.), Christo's Gates, Michael Jackson's trial, sex in art, and Christmas. The book is very prettily typeset, with covers printed in metallic gold ink, and bound with staples. You can see a larger image of the cover and read two columns.The entire edition is limited to 250 copies, fifty of which are signed and numbered by the author. ISBN-10: 0-9666328-8-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-9666328-8-0
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Rabbit Duck 13 collaborative poems by Richard Hell and David Shapiro
(Milwaukee: REPAIR, 2005) 6" x 9" 32 pp. paperback 1st edition signed by both authors $30.00
This first edition of the thirteen poem sequence David Shapiro and Hell perpetrated in 2003-2004 comprises 500 copies bound in paper. The book is a lovely object, printed entirely in letterpress (old-fashioned moveable type -- the tube amps of the printed word -- that's set in lines, inked, and then pressed into the paper, rather than pages reproduced photographically / electronically), on acid free paper, with Smyth-sewn binding. The cover and the one internal drawing are by Noel Black. The physical book is produced to the highest standards of craft, and not only looks gorgeous, but is as durable as a paper book can be. Shapiro, Richard's collaborator here, is, as the book's bio note states, "a poet and art critic. He was a professional violinist in his youth. His first book of poems, January (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), was published to lavish praise from such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and Jack Kerouac, when Shapiro was eighteen years old. Subsequent collections include Lateness, To an Idea, After a Lost Original, and A Burning Interior (all from The Overlook Press). He has written many books on art, including a pioneering study of Mondrian's flower paintings, and the first volume on Jasper Johns's drawings. He lives in Riverdale, NY and teaches at William Patterson College and the Cooper Union." The poems are thought-provoking, lyrical, funny, and crazy. You can see a page we've made displaying the cover enlarged, and sample poems.
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Sad Songs art show catalogue with essay "Sadness Notes" by Hell
(Normal: University Galleries, 2005) 7" x 5" 48 pp. paperback 1st edition $7.95
(special website price, marked down from $13.95 list)
Sad Songs was an art show curated by Bill Conger at the University Galleries of Illinois State University in March-April, 2005. It included works by such artists as Jack Pierson, Rene Ricard, and Whitney Bedford. Richard contributed a piercing 1500 word essay entitled "Sadness Notes." It's about art and sadness but doesn't refer to any of the paintings, though rather to such thinkers and writers as Schopenhauer, Paul Verlaine, Borges, and Rene Ricard. Hell suggests sadness just barely defeats funniness in the metaphysical sweepstakes. He also includes some personal anecdotes.
Two sorts of experience are the most sad, though they are related complexly. The first is the sadness of innocence, which, of course, like everything in language and human existence (except poetry, "spiritual transport"), only exists in relation to its violation, its loss, absence, or opposing counterpart. The other is the sadness of betrayal -- not of being betrayed, but rather the act of betraying another. These plights are built deeply into our self-conception, of course: paradise and its loss; the human betrayal of "God" -- which is another aspect of the (biblical) description of our being and its origins -- though Judas is a purer example. I have two stories about the first type of sadness, both of which have to do with my daughter, and which are moments that felt gorgeously sad. The first one was funny too.
When Ruby was around three years old, one day I was alone with her in an elevator going down on our way to the playground in the park. I'm tall, and, as I spoke to her, in order to see her face to face I squatted down on my haunches. She immediately did the same thing, defeating my purpose. She thought that if I did it, it must be the proper way to behave.
Another time when she was a small child and had done something wrong, misbehaved somehow, I had the sudden realization that, "There will come a time when she won't be forgiven."
ISBN 0-945558-36-8
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From the Velvets to the Voidoids the birth of punk by Clinton Heylin
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005) 5.25" x 8.5" 426 pp. paperbound updated edition of original 1993 book $13.95 (special website price, marked down from $16.95 list)
From the Velvets to the Voidoids [larger cover image] was the first book to describe the history of punk at its origins in the United States. What still distinguishes the book, after all that has been published on the subject, is its accuracy. Yes, there are some errors -- a date or a birth place is occasionally off -- but Heylin, of all the journalists, fans, and critics, is the most careful to refrain from perpetuating mis-information. Unlike the huge majority of pop music writers, who do nothing but regurgitate the errors of previous journalists, Heylin actually goes to the original sources, the musicians themselves and the public records of the era (original venue ads, collector live gig tapes, contemporary fanzine interviews...), for his data, and then he does his best to double check that before publishing it. The book is comprised mostly of interviews with the bands about the music and its development. So, if you want to know what happened in New York, Cleveland, and Detroit, involving The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones, Blondie, the Heartbreakers, The Talking Heads, The Modern Lovers, The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Peter Laughner, The Eels, the MC5, the Stooges, etc., etc., this is the place to look. Granted, Heylin is annoyingly self-absorbed and opinionated and combative, but strictly as history this is the best book on the subject. This new edition adds a thirty page author's rant tracing activities of the book's subjects in the period since its original publication in 1993. ISBN 1-55652-575-3
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Psychopts artist's book collaboration with Christopher Wool
(New York: JMc & GHB Editions, 2008) 7" x 9" 128 pp. paperback with dustjacket 1st edition $100.00
Psychopts is the result of a year long collaboration between Hell and reknowned artist Christopher Wool (who supplied the artwork for the cover of Hell's CUZ Editions poem book Weather, as well as the photo on the cover of Hell's novel Godlike). Each of the 57 recto pages of the book is a separate image made out of words, and the sequence of images is arranged with deliberation. The book could be considered a story in pictures. But it's an artist's book: one that is meant to be regarded as an aesthetic object. The production values are superlative. Every aspect of the physical book is considered and manifested without regard for cost. The paper is of supreme quality and the binding is sewn. The book is gorgeous and obscene and brilliant and funny. Interview magazine conducted an interview with Richard and Christopher about the book. You can see some sample images. ISBN (13): 978-0-9795-0775-5; ISBN (10): 0-9795-0775-8
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Go Now novel by Hell
(New York: Scribner, 1997) 5" x 8" 175 pp. paperback [SOLD OUT]
Go Now is a novel, set in 1980, about a burnt-out junkie punk named Billy Mud who thinks he's gotten a chance to renew his relationship with his French dream soul-mate Chrissa while also outdistancing his drug habit and proving he's good for something. All this because his longtime benefactor/admirer, rock 'n' roll entrepreneur Jack, has commissioned him to drive a 1957 DeSoto Adventurer from California to New York with Chrissa along, the idea being that she'll take pictures--she's a photographer--and he'll take notes and they'll make a book out of the experience. It turns out not to go quite as they'd hoped. You can check some reviews and excerpts.
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Godlike novel by Hell
(New York: Little House on the Bowery [imprint of Akashic], 2005) 5.25" x 8.25" 144 pp. paperback corrected 2nd edition (2011) [SOLD OUT]
Godlike is the best piece of work Richard's ever done in any medium, being a loose riff on the famous relationship of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but set one century later in New York City. It depicts a middle-aged poet, Paul Vaughn, recalling in 1997 the intense affair he had in 1971 -- when he was 27 -- with a brilliant 16-year-old boy, "T." (Randall Terence Wode), also a poet.The novel shifts back and forth between the middle-aged writer, temporarily hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, ruminating on his condition while he convalesces, and the novel (Godlike within the novel Godlike) he's writing in order to preserve his memories of the burning, fervent period in the early seventies that he spent with his adolescent boyfriend. The volume offered is the 2011 2nd edition of the book incorporating a number of small corrections to the sold-out 1st edition (and a few new mistakes!). There is an excellent, extensive interview with Richard regarding the novel at 3AM literary ezine, and we've created a page with reviews of and an excerpt from the novel, as well as one of Hell's "Supplemental Notes" to the book. ISBN 1-888451-77-7
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CBGB: Decades of Graffiti photo book with intro by Hell
(New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2006) 9" x 7" 64 pp. paperback 1st edition [SOLD OUT]
This book is a brilliant idea, nicely executed. We believe it to be the best chronicle, the best print evocation of CBGB's available. It's simply photographs of the empty interior of the club as it looked the summer before it closed, which is pretty much just the way it has looked since it became known in the mid '70s. The photographs are by John Putnam, and there is a small amount of text by Christopher D. Salyers also scattered through the book. Hell supplied the 1,000 word intro. Here's a paragraph from it:
Above all, though, the effect of the surfaces of CBGB's dark, crazed insides is eerie, it's haunting. It's like a dead-quiet, chillingly colorful cemetary. Or autopsy: all of compacted history sliced open. It's not so much that the graffiti evokes the endless procession of individual kids who've attended the club, but that it evokes their absence, their faceless selves buried under the next pretty layer of pointless assertion. The walls are an onslaught of death and futility as much as they are of life and vitality. The kids believed themselves to be unique individuals; the walls they covered with that claim are the proof that it's a delusion. Or is this what we knew all along, and the walls are sites of reveling in it, reveling in undifferentiation? Because it does seem sweet and innocent and loveable too.
You can view some page samples from the book ISBN 0-9772827-5-9
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Disgusting drawings and writings by Hell, with unique endpapers by Josh Smith
(New York: 38th Street Publishers, 2010) 5.25" x 8.5" 22 pp. 1st edition LIMITED to 300 copies -- trade edition [SOLD OUT]
or for one of the 26 lettered copies in slipcases, signed by Richard Hell and Josh Smith [SOLD OUT]
This is the second book of Richard's published by Todd Amicon's and painter Josh Smith's 38th Street Publishers, the first being 2009's Voidoid edition illustrated by Kier Cooke Sandvik. Disgusting is a select arrangement of writings and drawings by Hell made in the past seven or eight years. All the pieces are quite different from each other, ranging from a page of prose on self-disgust to a drawing of the view of the darkness beyond the refrigerator in Richard's apartment, to a poem about time that concludes "Poets are fools but I don't give a fuck / anymore. Life's only good when it's well written" (and three other recent poems, each in it's own form and style), to journal entries about the deaths of his friends Lizzy Mercier and Robert Quine (which happened to occur within two months of each other in 2004). Regardless of the variety, though, the book is fully integrated, a work of its own, much more than the sum of its parts. The pamphlets are saddle-stitched and the covers are made from the heavy card poster for the recent DVD re-release of the 1978 movie Blank Generation. Each poster yielded four separate covers, so each pamphlet has one of four different covers. Customers are not allowed to specify cover choice, sorry. Every cover is great. Josh Smith hand-created each specially-painted set of "endpapers" (here that means the inside of both the front and the back cover, as well as the page that faces each), so every book is different in that respect. The item is a sculpture as well as a book! It's magnificent, in its disgusting way. We also have a few copies of the twenty-six signed, lettered A-Z edition, that comes in a manila slipcase. You can see images and read samples from Disgusting onsite.
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WANNA GO OUT? by Theresa Stern poems of Theresa Stern
by R. Hell & T. Verlaine
(Perpignan: Éditions Anna Polèrica, 1999) 5.5" x 8.625" 59 pp. softcover [SOLD OUT]
Wanna Go Out? by Theresa Stern, a collection of 17 poems, was originally published by Dot Books in 1973. Though not indicated anywhere in the book, it was really written by Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine. There're a couple of pages devoted to it on site (be sure to click on her face). That edition is long out of print. This new edition is a French translation by the Parisian poet Michel Bulteau. The text in English is on pages facing its French counterpart and is exactly the same as the original (except the missing blurbs: "Wanna Go Out is a question often asked on the streets around the cheaper bars in New York and Hoboken," and "Like myself my poetry is so alive it stinks"). It's a beautifully done design and production, printed in 10 pt. Bauer Bodoni on fine cotton laid paper, limited to 1000 numbered copies. ISBN 2-951127-61-8
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ARTIFACT notebooks 1974-1980
(NY and Madras: Hanuman, 1992) 2.75" x 4.125" 170 pp. softcover [ SOLD OUT]
Artifact is number 37 in the sadly long-completed Hanuman series of tiny art/poetry books edited and published by artist Francesco Clemente and editor/archivist/artwriter genius Raymond Foye. Hell's contribution to the series is comprised of diaries, ideas, jotted lines and titles, and such material, that made up his working notebooks in the '70s. There are photographs from the period too. The first edition of 4,000 sold out almost right away; this is the second edition. We have fewer than ten copies of this left. The lowest price elsewhere on the web is $20. (Other writers and artists in the 48 book series include John Ashbery, Willem DeKooning, Cookie Mueller, Frances Picabia, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Eileen Myles, Amy Gerstler, Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac, Elaine Equi, and Bob Dylan.) ISBN 0-937815-39-X
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PUNK #0 (2001) magazine w/ a column by Hell
(New York: Punk Magazine, 2001) 8.5" x 11" 54 pp. softcover [ SOLD OUT]
This is the 25th Anniversary resuscitation of John Holmstrom's original Punk. It can't be said too often: the first among stupid zines remains the fantastically stupidest. Among the highlights of this issue are a beautiful paean to KMaC (Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, from spirals to elbows), an interview with Extreme Championship Wrestler Sabu (who doesn't speak any English), Legs McNeil's "What's your favorite line from the Simpsons?" Funpage, and Richard's column recounting true life from "The Mouth of Hell." There are four full page color photos by Roberta Bayley too. Check Hell samples and bigger cover.
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Raw Periphery #1 1997 comic w/ a text by Hell
(San Jose: Slave Labor Graphics, 1997) 6" x 10" 32 pp. softcover [ SOLD OUT]
This comic book has full color covers by Omaha Perez and 32 black and white inner pages presenting four stories: Richard's "Dear Reader" with art by Perez, Ann Nocenti's "Jezebel's Virtue" with art by James Romberger, Robert Hunter's (yes, the Grateful dead lyricist) "The Watchman," art by Perez, and a last story, "Dreamlogic," "dreamt and illustrated" by Perez. Hell's contribution is a baroque story from about 1979 (it was originally published in Hell's "Slum Journals" column in The East Village Eye back then) attempting to seduce the perverse reader into imagining a sexual encounter with his/her "identical twin of the opposite sex." Strange, overwrought, but interesting. Maybe Poe crossed with Borges on crystal meth. You can check a page.
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