The American artists muchimitated memoir described by Paul Auster as one of the few totally original books I have ever read.Joe Brainards I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography Brainards 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 I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad policemen would put you in jail. Brainards enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970 Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember which quickly sold out he 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 in New York 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. Then in 1975 Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.