John Lennon's Schoolbook Auctioned
One of
John Lennon's schoolbooks was sold for $226,150 in
a London auction of rock memorabilia. The auction house, Cooper Owen, had set
a reserve price of more than $175,000 for the book, which was a copybook titled "My Anthology" and contained
10 pages of full color drawings done by the 12-year old Lennon to illustrate the lyrics of poems that were part of his
literature curriculum, including The Walrus and the Carpenter and Agincourt.
If only I had known that used schoolbooks could go for so much, I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to unload my old textbooks at the end of every semester at university. Needless to say, the illustration quality in a calculus textbook would have to be fairly high to compete with Lennon's sketches, even as a child.