In accordance with his duties as a kind of cultural archaeologist within the book, Davies presents the Lennon letters, written between 19, in a reverential manner, giving an introduction, context and number to each piece, and reproducing them in full colour, together with his own typescripts so that we don’t have to work too hard to decipher the messy and dashed-off handwriting, as Lennon was (perhaps forgivably) a terrible speller, with a sloppy approach to grammar. He has also done a fine job in tracking down the recipients and owners of these letters, while putting them into a readable and roughly chronological order, with some sense of narrative cohesion. He gained authorisation to edit nearly 300 of these highly prized documents, from individual private collections around the globe, ostensibly because he published the first and only authorised biography of the Beatles in 1968, before going on to author a book on the celebrated Lake District fell-walker Alfred Wainwright, of course! He has had the blessing of Yoko Ono in putting this book together, as well as the good wishes of pretty much all of the surviving Beatles insiders (even if Lennon did call his biography ‘bullshit’ in a 1971 interview for Rolling Stone magazine). What is immediately apparent from The John Lennon Letters, a fine-looking, all-white hardback book, is that editor Hunter Davies clearly recognises any scrap of paper marked with Lennon’s scribble as a massively important and valuable British cultural artefact. However, as a Beatleologist who is not sufficiently rich, old or lucky, the nearest I have ever come to owning some Beatles writing is when I purchased a signed copy, for £15, of Pete Best’s 1997 book, The Best Years of the Beatles.

I have also entertained the idea recently of raising the sum of $35,000 to purchase an unearthed eight-page Lennon epistle to Eric Clapton from 1971, which went up for sale at an auction in Los Angeles in December 2012.

I’d love to be someone fortunate enough to own a piece of handwriting or typescript attributed to the late Dr Winston O’ Boogie (aka John Lennon), either in a frame or within a Swiss bank safe deposit box – I don’t mind! I was mightily impressed when I saw some examples of the songwriter’s large and spidery scrawl (the lyrics for the Beatles songs ‘Help!’ and ‘In My Life’) through glass-encased panels at a British Museum exhibition many years ago, alongside extracts of manuscripts by Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, of all people. Hunter Davies, ed., The John Lennon Letters (W&N, 2012) In this post, I am happy to discover the items on John Lennon’s shopping list of.

John lennon letters to cynthia