Joe Brainard2001911MoMA PS1Joe Brainard: A Retrospective1970GRANARY BOOKS20012

I REMEMBER1940195019601970I REMEMBER

Ron Padgett

Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Asbhery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard’s method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain “I remember“.

The reprint of this classic was issued in conjunction with the traveling exhibition and catalogue Joe Brainard: A Retrospective. In 1970, Angel Hair Books published the first edition of I Remember700 copies that quickly sold out. Brainard wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art published Brainards I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World, and The New York Herald. In 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version, which collected all three of the Angel Hair volumes, the MoMA booklet, and added new material, using the original title I Remember. The most recent edition was published by Viking Penguin in 1994. The Granary Books edition includes all of the material from the Full Court and Viking Penguin edtions along with a newly written afterword by Ron Padgett. Designed by Amber Phillips, the Granary edition has been available since 2001 with more than 20,000 copies in print.