I Remember (1970)

• Published: Angel Hair Books, New York, 1970
• Edition: First edition
• Limitation: One of 700 trade copies (of 726)
• Binding: Photographic wrappers
• Dimensions: Small quarto
• Language: English
• Condition: Fine.

Every sentence in this book begins with the words "I remember", and from that single rule Joe Brainard built one of the most original memoirs in American writing: an Oklahoma boyhood in the 1940s and 50s, movies, candy, church, clothes, the body and desire, New York, in fragments that are funny, exact and unexpectedly moving. Angel Hair Books, the press of the poets Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, published this first edition in 1970.

Brainard extended it in More I Remember and More I Remember More, and the collected I Remember of 1975 has been reissued many times. In France it inspired Georges Perec's Je me souviens (1978), which borrowed the form outright, and teachers of writing have used it as a model ever since. Paul Auster called it a masterpiece, one of the few totally original books he had read.

One of 700 trade copies, from an edition of 726.