I phone Camden Joy at his home in Squantum. " Sorry, " he says, " I’m putting on my socks right now. " He pauses, and the line is silent for a moment.

" So yeah, " he continues, talking about his November 7 appearance at Brookline Booksmith, " I’ll reading from Lost Joy, showing slides and playing music. I’m gonna be showing slides of the Souled American posters, reading excerpts from the Souled American posters, and playing some Souled American music. "

Souled American, you probably don’t remember, were band of a sleepily cerebral Chicagoans who played a peculiar hybrid of country roots and dub reggae. They released a few albums; by the end of the ’90s they were all but forgotten. Camden Joy loved that band. Or at least, he liked them a lot. He liked them so much that he authored a series of gigantic, rambling manifestos, febrile exhortations that were factual and fictional, and then plastered the East Village with the sexily designed entreaties, " Fifty Posters About Souled American " (actually, there were 67), which implored passers-by to spare a thought for a band they’d never heard of.

Lost Joy (TNI) compiles 37 of these posters. It also gathers up various other chapbooks, scrawled indictments, and telephone-pole polemics that Joy strewed around Manhattan in the mid ’90s. Things like " The Greatest Record Album Ever Told, " a lengthy paean to Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year, in which Joy tries to suss what kind of a world it is where such virtuous songcraft could get the ex-Pixie summarily dropped from his label. Lost Joy also makes some of his ephemeral works more durable, like " Surviving Sinatra, " which transcribes his oddly moving homily, from PRI’s This American Life, about an epiphanic experience he had while watching The Manchurian Candidate in a Turkish kebab house.

Joy had written more conventional articles for publications like the Village Voice (later, after moving to Boston, he wrote about Souled American for the Phoenix), but he was dissatisfied. He wanted a more direct and more æsthetic way to goad the complacency and corporate cupidity — the " advertocracy, " he called it — that he saw compromising and destroying the music he loved. One of his public projects, " This Poster Will Change Your Life, " took direct aim at Macintosh’s New York Music Festival with a scad of scrawled bons mots cribbed from Clash and Dylan songs.

" Design plays a huge element in how you apprehend a particular piece, " he says, " and I was never that fond of most of the designs of the weeklies that were printing my stuff. And it wasn’t like I was making any money on those pieces, so I might as well put out these little odd things instead. Plus, I always liked the idea of accomplishing several things at once, or having a story that masquerades as something else, like the pamphlets as these Amnesty International–type pleas, or these faux religious pleas. "

Although he’s gone on to pen cult novels like the rock romans à clef The Last Rock Star Book, or Liz Phair: A Rant and Cracker-obsessed Boy Island and the recent novellas Pan (written with Great Pop Things author Colin B Morton), Hubcap Diamondstar Halo, and Palm Tree 13 (these three published by Cambridge’s Highwater Books), Joy’s original fleeting theses have heretofore existed more as legend than as fact. It’s a coup, then, that these apologias — cryptic and enigmatic, like impassioned dispatches telegraphed from some plane beyond our ken — have finally been put between covers.

In one of his Souled American posters, Joy quotes that line from Yeats’s " The Second Coming " where " the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. " He should realize that he’s its most emphatic rebuttal.

Camden Joy reads from Lost Joy on Thursday, November 7, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Brookline. Call (617) 566-6660.