Welcome to the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection. Housed on the campus of Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ, the Collection serves the research and informational needs of music fans, scholars, authors and others with a serious interest in Bruce Springsteen’s life and career.
With materials dating from 1927 to the present, the Collection includes holdings in multiple formats: books, songbooks, tourbooks, magazines, fanzines, Internet articles, academic journals and papers, comic books, selected printed items, newspaper articles, historic memorabilia, CDs, vinyl recordings, posters, DVDs and videos.
To date the Collection has received documents originating in 45 countries, reflecting the enduring international interest in Springsteen’s music and live performances: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, UK, Uruguay, USA, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe.
The Springsteen Special Collection originated in the summer of 2001 with a concern over the rate at which magazine and newspaper articles on Springsteen’s early career, once plentiful, had become increasingly scarce. To address this problem, the Springsteen fanzine, Backstreets Magazine, organized a fan-to-fan campaign to collect and organize essential documents from each phase of Springsteen’s career, ensuring that the historic record would be publicly accessible to all who have a serious interest in Bruce Springsteen’s life and career.
At a dedication ceremony for the Collection Dec. 8, 2001, Backstreets editor Christopher Phillips summarized our vision for the Collection when he said:
“The truly essential works by biographers, critics, scholars, journalists and fans are together in one place. The Collection documents all phases of Springsteen’s career and should be an indispensable tool for researchers and fans alike.”
And during a concert that evening at Convention Hall, Bruce Springsteen thanked those who attended the dedication, adding:
”The Collection has almost 1,000 books and magazines on myself and the band–more stuff than every place except my mother’s basement!”