Punk Culture in Bobst: Our Visit to the Fales Library

Home to the country's largest collections of books on food studies and punk culture, the Fales Library is a fascinating little gem tucked on the third floor of NYU's Library, Bobst.

Fales' Director, Marvin Taylor, guided our journalism class around the stacks, which now contain more than 228,000 volumes. He held up a tiny cuneiform tablet from 3250 B.C., the museum's oldest artifact, and ten minutes later, he was flipping through Patti Smith's leather-bound journal from the late 1970s, which she gave to punk legend Richard Hell. "Please Kill Me," Hell had written in large letters on one of the first pages - an expression that later came to represent the early punk persona. (It's also the title of the "uncensored oral history of punk".)

"Punk is all about style - it's not about authenticity," said Taylor. "It's about performance."

With matchbook art, S&M photographs, post-modern dance and Richard Hell, Taylor walked us through the punk culture and underground art and performance scene of the last thirty years. Photographer Jimmy de Sana chronicled the artists, writers, and musicians of the punk era through his photos. We flipped through his most disturbing work, "The Submission Series," which involved a lot of uncomfortable-looking poses in leather, echoing the work of Robert Mapplethorpe.

The trauma of experiencing the AIDS epidemic in New York, Taylor said, had inspired him to start collecting the remnants of the punk scene. No one else was collecting this type of material, and Taylor knew these figures needed to be remembered. Both de Sana and Mapplethorpe, as well as thousands of other prominent artists, musicians, and writers, were victims of AIDS in the early 1990s.

Yet the tour ended with a small, happy book - a signed first edition of Irma Rimbauer's The Joy of Cooking, inscribed to AP syndicated food writer Cecily Brownstone.