Skip to content

Springsteen ‘Born to Run’ manuscript heads to summer auction

NEW YORK — Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting scrawl is born to make bucks.
11545911_web1_NYET521-112_2016_022439

NEW YORK — Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting scrawl is born to make bucks.

Sotheby’s said Friday that it will auction a handwritten working manuscript of “Born to Run” in June.

The presale estimate for the single sheet of notebook paper with 30 lines of writing is $200,000 to $300,000.

It will be offered in a books and manuscripts online auction from June 18 to June 28. It also will be exhibited in New York during that period. It’s being sold by an unidentified American collector.

Sotheby’s says many of the lines in this 1974 version are “apparently unpublished and unrecorded,” though the chorus is “nearly perfected.”

The artist tried out phrases, set off in parenthesis, with notes in the margin. His penmanship is adorned with curly-topped T’s.