Stay in Hard Days Night Hotel in Liverpool and you may just relive a distant memory of a Beatles concert from long ago. With Lennon and McCartney suites available in the birthplace of one of rock 'n' roll's greatest icons, Liverpool is bound to attract even more Beatles fans than ever before. This new attraction is sure to help the town's transformation from commercial marketplace to cultural hot spot. The hotel will feature 110 rooms for $340 per night, with the suites running for $1,300 per night, a Yellow Submarine jukebox, a stylish, basement bar, and modern European restaurant-- and of course tons of Beatles paraphernalia and music to boot. It opened on the first of February and is sure to bring tourists and music lovers from miles around, for years to come.

When it comes to the rarest, most valuable record albums, there are a lot of dollar signs floating around. The real prices turn out to be a little more grounded, although the figures themselves are elusive.

For example, in 1999, news broke that Mark David Chapman's copy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's album Double Fantasy, autographed by Lennon five hours before Chapman fatally shot him, had been sold. The album had been found in a flower planter outside the Dakota apartment building, Lennon and Ono's home on Manhattan's Upper West Side and the scene of the Beatle's 1980 murder. The record bears the forensically certified fingerprints of Chapman, and was even used as evidence in the case against him (Chapman plead guilty to second-degree murder). Price tag? $460,000.

Or was it? I spoke with Gary Zimet of Moments in Time, the New York memorabilia dealer who brokered the sale of the Chapman album. Zimet told me that the $460,000 figure released in 1999 was for publicity purposes, and said the record was actually sold for $150,000. News reports several years later of the album's sale for as much as $525,000 are also in error; Zimet said a deal was in place in 2003, but it fell through. He did note though that the album's owner remains willing to part with it for around $600,000 (beware, though -- upon the purchase in 1999, the owner received a number of death threats).

But so far, the Chapman record has fetched only $150,000 (pocket change, right?). This changes the equation, in light of an eBay auction in 2006.

John Lennon's glasses, yes the legend himself, are up for auction on the British site 991.com. The Beatle's gold wire rimmed sunglasses are currently owned by a Japanese TV producer named Junishi Yore who got them back in 1966 when he worked as a translator for the Beatles, and they'll come with a handwritten note from Yore explaining how he came to get them from Lennon. Estimates are predicting the auction will end somewhere around $1.5 million or higher, although it's a private auction so we'll have to wait and see when the bidding ends on July 31st.

An angry letter written by John Lennon sold for more than $22,000 at a Bonham's auction yesterday. The note was dashed off on a piece of American Airlines notepaper, clearly in a hurry. It was written to a journalist who accused him and the Beatles of ripping off "black" songs, but John defended the band by saying that they "drank, ate and slept the music" and "it wasn't a rip off. It was a love in."  The band started off covering hit songs in dance halls, like "Money" and "Twist n' Shout," before their own songs were "good enough." Included with the letter was a photocopy of the article that prompted it and a copy of the replying letter from the same journalist.

Though some other Lennon pieces have done very well at auction this year, a black felt hat worn by Lennon in the last official Beatles photo shoot failed to sell, despite projections that it could fetch as much as $37,000.

[Image Bonhams]

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.