"OH, TO BE REBORN WITHIN THE PAGES OF A BOOK"

SMITH, Patti. M Train. New York Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Octavo, original brown cloth, original dust jacket. $225.

First edition of Patti Smith's memoir—"achingly beautiful… both lyrical and radiantly pictorial"—inscribed by her on the title page, "To R— With all good wishes Patti Smith."

"Patti Smith's achingly beautiful new book, M Train, is a kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance… to a time when she increasingly began to capture and memorialize moments from her life in photos and words—to create, as an artist, talismanic souvenirs of the past. Of which this book is one. Musician, poet and photographer, Smith, 68, is remarkably attuned to the sound and sorcery of words, and her prose here is both lyrical and radiantly pictorial… an eloquent—and a deeply moving—elegy for what she has 'lost and cannot find' but can remember in words" (New York Times). M Train is, especially, "a bibliophile's trove, with striking insights into the books that ignited Smith's imagination… 'The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there,' she writes. 'Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book'" (Washington Post). Copyright page with "First Edition"; no printings stated: issued along with the Canadian edition, no priority established. Containing 55 black-and-white illustrations from photographs by Smith.

A fine copy.