U2 itineraries..... How many?

Nice question isn't it? And not easy to answer at all. The truth is that after some years collecting these beautiful books I learned that you can never be sure you have a full knowledge on this topic.

When I was 100% sure U2 had started using itineraries for the first time on The Joshua Tree tour....a book belonging to WAR tour came up on Ebay so I can imagine there are other books for WAR tour and....some other books were also printed for The Unforgettable Fire tour as I could confirm later on.

After a couple of years with no new itineraries around we reached February 2014 and I realized that U2 had used itinerary books also on the OCTOBER tour....and a Crew book was issued also for the Zooropa'93 tour. So...2 more books to add to the list.

Some time later I got the leather version of the itinerary book for Zooropa'93 and...oh surprise....it did include also the information for the ROW leg of the Zoo TV tour. This means there are 2 different versions of the Zooropa Leather itinerary. Amazing.....

Some time later, in February 2016 I found 3 new itineraries form the The Joshua Tree tour. One is covering the final leg and has a different cover than the one we already knew. The other two are Crew itineraries for that final leg also.

And last but not least, in October 2015 I had a triple surprise again. When it seemed that for some 360º legs and i+e tour band and crew got pdfs and online information, I knew about 3 new itinerary books: 360º Europe, 360º Australia and N.Zealand and i+e USA leg 2015. Stunning.....once again!

Considering that, I updated the U2 itineraries list, including all those books I do know for sure exist... some more will probably appear in the future and I will have to update this entry again.

So at the moment I'm writing this entry I know about the existence of a total of 53 different U2 itinerary books. When I say different I am considering that 2 books with same content but different cover are different books (i.e. I consider Popmart Europe itinerary book with colorfull cover and/or black and white cover as two different books.....or Zooropa with cardboard cover is one book and the same one with leather book is a different itinerary for me).

This is the full list with dates and comments (CLICK ON THE LIST TO SEE ALL THE INFO !!) :

As you see some tours had the same itinerary for band and crew, some other tours or legs had specific itineraries for band and specific books for crew, final legs of 360º only had itineraries for crew....I don't really know the reason as this has been changing tour after tour.

About how difficult can be to find each one of those books...it off course depends on the book. We should think bigger tours, with more people involved, should have more itineraries on the road so those books might be easier to find. That's right...but not accurate.

For my experience I can say the books you can see more often for sale are those from Popmart tour....but it does not mean all the Popmart itineraries are easy to find at all.

Also the older the tour is, the harder to find its itineraries. October, War, The Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree and Lovetown tour itineraries are not easy to find and rarely come up for sale.

There are also some legs which books have been printed in very little quantities so they are very hard to find (360º Band itineraries for Europe and Australia/NZ 2010 or i+e Tour USA 2015).

If I had to mention the most common books I'd think of the Popmart Europe Advance Popmart itinerary, the Popmart Europe (B/W cover) itinerary book, Popmart USA Leg 3 (B/W cover) book and the U2 360º 2009 crew book.

But...be careful because there are many counterfeits or fake copies of the Popmart Europe Advance Popmart itinerary and the U2 360º 2009 crew book, most of them coming recently from an Ebay mexican seller.

On the other side, there are many books I only saw one or two times for sale so you can imagine they won't be easy to find....the ones from October and War tours, the one from The Unforgettable Fire tour, the TJT 1st leg book, all those from Lovetown tour, the 2  ZOO TV outside broadcast crew books, the ROW ZOO TV itinerary, the Popmart USA advance itinerary, the ROW Popmart with colour cover, the 4 Elevation books, the ROW Vertigo book in both versions and even the more recent 360º 2011 Crew book and i+e USA itinerary ......Difficult to make a list as they all are quite rare.

And finally...the prices....off course these books value has increased in the last few years as soon as people knew about their existance and had more information about each book. Don't get crazy bidding for them...more than 100 Euros is already too much on those more common books. Collecting is just a question of patience...some day you will find the gemm you have been looking for...at a reasonable price.

It took me about 15 years to get all my itineraries. Once again....be patient.

Don't forget that if you want to see the itinerary books per tour you can use the Tags menu on the right side of this blog. Every tag takes you directly to the different books issued for every single tour.

I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I do.

The Collector