John Lennon is one of those people — with a cultural imprint so deep and luminous, and a fan-following so crazed that every throwaway bit of his life, every scrap of his body and mind is endlessly fascinating and valuable.

Everyone’s curious about Lennon
In 2007, a lock of his hair was sold for $48,000. So, there is little doubt that every word that he ever scrawled on a piece of paper would be a much-prized collectible. The quality or the literary value of his words have no bearing on the matter. As Hunter Davies, the British author-journalist, who wrote the earliest and perhaps most definitive of The Beatles’ biographies, writes in the introduction to this compilation of Lennon’s letters, notes and scribbles, “Even if the contents are not new or earth-shattering, readers will be interested to see what he wrote, to whom and how he illustrated those letters.”