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Faber to publish Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’ notebooks

By | Published on Monday 1 September 2014

Ian Curtis

Faber & Faber has announced that it will publish a new collection of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’s lyrics and previously unpublished notebooks, called ‘So This Is Permanence’, on 2 Oct. The book was edited by writer Jon Savage with Curtis’s wife Deborah.

“There are about three notebooks of lyrics and also about another 120 or 130 loose pages, as I remember”, Savage told CMU. “So there’s quite a lot of handwritten material”.

On the insight the book gives, he added: “Ian wrote compulsively. He wrote a lot. And it also shows the development of his writing from the early Warsaw days through to Joy Division. He was a writer, you know, he really worked hard on his lyrics. There are a few prose pieces too, which are very much in a science fiction vein, so you get an idea of what his influences were, which is dystopian fiction and science fiction. There’s not really any great revelation – that’s not really what this book’s about. On the other hand you will get some insight into how he wrote and what he wrote”.

In addition to the standard edition of the book, there will be a 200 limited edition copies available. These will come signed by Savage, Deborah Curtis and the three surviving members of Joy Division, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris. The limited edition version will also include a signed and numbered reproduction of Ian Curtis’ handwritten ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ lyrics.

Read more from our conversation with Jon Savage here.



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