When he moved into his East Village apartment in 1974, Richard Hell was 24 years old and playing bass in Television, the influential proto-punk band that was one of the first to play at CBGB. At the time, the rent on the one-bedroom unit was about $110 a month. “The heat would be off for months at a time,” Mr. Hell recalled, “but then they would forget to collect rent, so it kind of balanced out.” Over the next 50-plus years, he formed a few new bands (including the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids), starred in a couple of movies (including Susan Seidelman’s “Smithereens”), and quit music for a writing career, penning volumes of poetry and cultural criticism, two novels, and a celebrated 2013 autobiography, “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.” In February, New York Review Books reissued “Godlike,” his visceral 2005 novel about a pair of dissolute New York poets in the 1970s. One thing that’s never changed is this rent-stabilized apartment, where Mr. Hell, now 76, spends his days surrounded by poetry and literature. “The dominant message” of the place, he said, is ‘this person likes books.’” His collection numbers in the thousands, despite periodic attempts to cull it. “I had a transcendent experience three or four years ago when I decided I was going to finally dust my books, and had to take all of them down by hand,” he said. “It was sublime. I couldn’t restrain myself from going through each book. Every one had a whole story for me.” This limited edition of the poet Bill Knott’s 1971 book “Nights of Naomi,” featuring an illustration and inscription from the author, is “my ideal of a printed book,” Mr. Hell said. “There’s nothing on any of the pages but the poems. The typeface is perfect.” He owns two copies. “I’ll buy a third if I ever see one,” he said. This “Slave/Salve” print is an offshoot of “Psychopts,” a 2008 collaboration between Mr. Hell and the artist Christopher Wool, a longtime friend. The series of superimposed images was drawn from pairs of words that Mr. Hell had saved over the years. “It works on this original surrealist principle,” he said. “You put those two words together and you immediately have to find a link between them and their meaning.” The bookshelf displays ephemera that Mr. Hell has collected over time. He found this Mickey Mouse glove in a junk store years ago. “It’s evocative for me because I’ve always loved the Walt-era Disney animation,” he said. Several years ago he sent it to the painter Joyce Pensato when she was in hospice because she often depicted Mickey Mouse on her canvases. But Ms. Pensato had already died, and the glove was returned. Growing up in Lexington, Ky., as Richard Meyers, Mr. Hell was “obsessed” with birds for a time. “Me and my friend would go out with binoculars and walk into the woods and we’d collect nests,” he said. He spotted this robin’s nest during a visit to Lexington; afterward, the owner of the property mailed it to him. “It’s heavy; it’s all mud,” he said. “That’s how they stick it together, I guess.” Mr. Hell moved to New York at the age of 17 determined to be a poet. But New York “wasn’t the bohemian paradise I’d fantasized it was going to be,” he said. “Everybody was really competitive, even though there was nothing to win.” Disillusioned, he turned to music. “I thought, as long as I’m going to be here, I might as well be in some profession where I can make a living,” he said with a laugh. His copy of Ted Berrigan’s poetry collection “So Going Around Cities” is inscribed by its author, who also sent the enclosed postcard. It references Mr. Hell’s 1978 performance with Elvis Costello at a CBGB benefit for St. Marks Church. Since he knew Berrigan would be in the audience, Mr. Hell quoted lines from his poetry “just to blow his mind,” he said. “He got real friendly with me after that.” Also hidden inside his copy of “So Going Around Cities”is a postcard advertising a reading by Berrigan and Ron Padgett. The poet Alice Notley, who was Berrigan’s wife, did the illustration. A Nan Goldin photograph hangs on a living room wall. When Mr. Hell’s first full-length novel, “Go Now,” was coming out in 1996, he was unhappy with the proposed cover design and suggested this photograph instead. It depicts a hotel room in Germany, and “just felt like a good vibe,” Mr. Hell said. Ms. Goldin “was very generous and let us use it, and then she gave me the photo. That was very good of her.” After leaving music, Mr. Hell was briefly married to the singer Patty Smyth, with whom he had a daughter, Ruby. “It’s a great photo, isn’t it?” he said of this portrait of the two of them. It was taken in the mid-1980s, when Ruby was around 2 years old; Mr. Hell can’t remember the photographer. Ruby now lives in California. The apartment has occasionally featured in his work: On the cover of the Voidoids’ 1982 album “Destiny Street,” he sits on his bed with his bass, his red shirt halfway unbuttoned, while his friend Anne Militello stands next to the bedroom window. Now one corner of the bedroom serves as a work space for his girlfriend, Katherine Faw, who has published two novels and is at work on a third. Above her desk hangs a papier-mâché diorama of a pair of pheasants. Mr. Hell bought it sometime in the 1990s at Obscura, the old East 10th Street antiques store. “That has special sentimental value for me because it was the first time I’d bought anything outside of a cheap old print from a box in a used book store to put on my wall,” he said. Along with writing what he calls “convoluted, eccentric personal essays,” Mr. Hell is busy promoting the reissue of “Godlike.” The Christopher Wool photo used for the book’s cover hangs above the desk in his office. Among his most treasured possessions is his copy of the first English translation of the Comte de Lautréamont’s 1868 “Les Chants de Maldoror,” a book that is now recognized as a precursor to Surrealism. This edition’s font is Bodoni, which is “just about my favorite typeface,” he said. “I love this book because it just makes me happy to have the first translation in English, and it’s such a beautiful production.” Hanging nearby is a photo of CBGB taken by David Godlis, a photographer and artist whose pictures chronicled the 1970s punk scene. “I think I traded him something for it,” Mr. Hell said. “I came across that picture online somewhere, and it was the only time I’d ever seen a picture of CBGB’s that felt like CBGB’s to me.” Like many old tenement apartments, Mr. Hell’s has its bathtub in the kitchen. While he still uses the tub, he had to have its original spigot replaced: “They had to replace it with this ugly thing you can get in any hardware store on the corner.” But he held on to the original bathtub spigot. It dates from “probably 1913,” he said. Living in one place for so long has been “a wild ride,” he said. As the neighborhood has gentrified, so has his building. When he moved in, it was known as the Poets Building — Allen Ginsberg and Rene Ricard were among its tenants. Today, Mr. Hell has a handful of neighbors who have been there as long as he has — “a bunch of poets,” he said. He’s had numerous buyout offers over the past 15 years, but he’s not interested. “I love my apartment. I have no complaints about it,” he said. “The only thing I regret is that I don’t have more wall space for hanging art.” And his needs have evolved along with the neighborhood. “Now I have an apartment where they actually keep the heat on, I can get the most fantastic food within walking distance, I’m central to all the stuff I love to go to in Manhattan, and I don’t want to go out on the weekends because it’s such a frenzy of college kids and bridge-and-tunnel people and tourists,” he said. “But I don’t want to go out anyway. I have everything I need right here.”