In His Own Write and A Spaniard In The Works | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Vonbontee roared 
Gonna find out for myself probably later today – one of these is in my nearby library and I need something to read.

Same. If it’s “uncommon nonsense”, then it’ll be right up my alley. 

meanmistermustard said
John was very insecure at this time which is how we got ‘Help !’.

When Help ! came out, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it’s just a fast Rock ‘N’ Roll song. I didn’t realise it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. So it was my fat Elvis period. You see the movie: he – I – is very fat, very insecure, and he’s completely lost himself. And I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was.

Most of the first book (‘IHOW’) was material John wrote years previously, the second (‘ASITW’) had a lot written at the time.

From Joe’s article here

During the holiday John Lennon spent time reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books, which helped inspire his second collection of stories, A Spaniard In The Works.

I was writing The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield, the Sherlock Holmes piece; it was the longest one I’d ever done. I was seeing how far I could go. I would have gone on and on and made a whole book out of it, but I couldn’t.
I read one or two Conan Doyle books when I was younger, but on the boat that we’d hired there was a set of them. There was nothing else on the boat but books, half of them were in French and half of them in English. Tahiti and all those islands – great, but I still got into reading. I read every book that was in English whether I liked it or not; through boredom, really. There just happened to be a big volume of Sherlock Holmes, a sort of madman’s Sherlock Holmes where you get all the stories in one; and I realised that every story was the same. They’re all pretty similar; and that’s what I was doing, writing all of them into one. So I wrote one Shamrock Womlbs after three weeks of Sherlock Holmes in Tahiti.

Awesome! I’m not generally keen on mysteries but I love Sherlock Holmes. And I read books whether I like ’em or not, too– just for something to do. 

@Mr. Kite, if you like these two you should check out ‘Skywriting by Word of Mouth‘, the third collection of Johns writings and poems which got published after his death. It includes John’s take of the Beatles break-up.

 

Would be great if Yoko released another as there are more.
 

Oh, and whilst it comes to mind one of the best moments in any of the Beatles Christmas messages is when John talks about his book in the 1964 one. Really needs to be heard but a (hopefully exact) transcript reads 

…John speakin’. Thanks all of you bought me book. Thank you folks for buying it. It was very handy. I notice there was another one out pretty soon. It says here. Hope you buy that, too. It’ll be the usual rubbish but it won’t cost much. You see, that’s the bargain we’re going to strike up. I write them in my spare time. It says here. 

I’ve heard it. It’s really quite funny as he’s speaking in sort of a “I’m reading from a script and I’d like you to know it” sort of voice. The transcript seems pretty exact.