Thanks to our present way of life I am reading two books a week. Just finished Just Kids by Patti Smith which I would probably not have read had I not, a week ago, run out of books and, also had I not, only a month before discovered what an exceptional writer she is when I read M Train. Her material is riveting, we know, but writers can make a horrible hash of anything, if they are bad writers.
Sam Wagstaff was the rich collector and curator who became Robert Mapplethorpe's lover and patron. He also helped Patti Smith financially with a trip to Charleville, France, where the poet Authur Rimbaud was born and where he also died.
"When I was 16, he appealed to me, and at this time of my life, I'm still learning from him." Patti Smith said in an interview with Andy Gill in The Independent in 2007.
"Why I love Arthur Rimbaud is not because he was a princely fellow: I love his work."
When I took this picture, Mr. Wagstaff had recently finished cataloging his large collection of photographs. He showed my assistant and I some of the pictures he treasured most. He told us he had found most of them in book shops who also dealt in photographs, and in order to save time and fuss, when the shop's collections were in boxes, he bought the whole box and discarded what he did not want when he got home.
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