Collector’s Paradise is Allen Ruppersberg’s unique reflection on the history of popular American music. The product of years of combing flea markets and yard sales in search of both the visual and recorded history of rock and roll, this book traces rock and roll back to the Minstrel days and American popular song post-Civil War, in a chronological list of 1,500 key recordings and more than 300 color illustrations of material from Ruppersberg’s collection. In his introductory essay, Ruppersberg discusses the urgency he feels in creating this narrative of a common musical history before it is lost: If you live long enough you begin to see the endings of the things in which you saw the beginnings. “It seemed to me … that this was the last possible moment to be able to gather any of this material in the manner I did and I am even more convinced now that I was right.”