In His Own Write John Lennon

Getting Your Hands on In His Own Write by John Lennon

In His Own Write John Lennon is a 1964 absurdist sketch and prose collection co-written with Pete Shotton. It came out the same year as A Spaniard in the Works, which followed the same rough method. The book contains nonsense stories, crude drawings, and stream-of-consciousness pieces that are basically the literary equivalent of John Lennon going off the rails in front of a typewriter. People still read it, mostly out of curiosity or Lennon fandom, and it sold enough on the strength of Beatlemania that Penguin picked it up as part of their paperback lineup. The book is in print and available through standard retailers. Penguin has kept it in circulation for decades. You can get it from Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, or whatever local shop deals in paperback. It routinely sells for about eight to twelve pounds depending on the edition. The original 1964 edition had a different cover and slightly different page layout, but the text is essentially the same across reprintings. If you are after a first edition, those go for around three hundred to six hundred pounds on AbeBooks or eBay depending on condition. The dust jacket matters enormously for price. I bought a first edition copy in 2013 that had a torn jacket and was missing the price flap. The seller described it as "near fine" and I had to argue them down from four hundred quid to about two hundred and twenty. It was worth it, but the condition description was pure wishful thinking. Always ask for photos of the spine and the inside flyleaf before you commit to a first edition purchase. Those details reveal cracks and foxing that listing photos often crop out of frame.

There is also an audiobook version narrated by John himself, released later. It runs about forty-five minutes and covers several of the sketches. The recording quality is acceptable but the performances are uneven because John was clearly enjoying himself more than he was serving the material. Some listeners find that charm works in the material's favour. Others find it grating after the second story. Fair enough either way.

What Is Actually in the Book

The book is structured as a series of disconnected prose pieces, each with a title and a crude pen-and-ink drawing that looks like it was done during a ten-minute break. The most famous piece is "How I Peeled the Potato," which is exactly what it sounds like but written with an escalating sense of bureaucratic nightmare. Then there are shorter fragments, some only a paragraph long, that function more like jokes than narratives. Pete Shotton's contributions are harder to distinguish from John's. Scholars have spent time trying to separate their work but the line is blurry and nobody involved ever clarified who wrote which piece. That unresolved attribution issue is something you should know about if you plan to cite the book in any serious context. There is also a short story within the book called "With a Little Help from My Friends" that prefigures the song. The lyrics appeared two years later on Sgt Pepper, and the prose version shares the same character and basic plot beats but stretches them out into nonsense dialogue. If you are reading the book expecting a coherent narrative arc, you will be waiting a very long time and you will not find one. It is deliberately disjointed, which is the whole point.

How to Approach Reading It

Do not read this straight through in one sitting. The humor relies on absurdity hitting you repeatedly without buildup, and that becomes exhausting after about twenty minutes. I read it cover to cover once in a weekend and mostly remembered nothing from the middle sections. The opening and closing pieces stick better because they frame the chaos. A better approach is to read one or two stories, put the book down, and come back later. The absurdist effect depends on your brain resetting between pieces. The drawings are an essential part of the experience, so do not skim past them. John and Pete drew these themselves, and the visual crudeness reinforces the tone. Some of the illustrations are darker than the text around them, which creates an odd dissonance. You notice it more on re-reads. The first pass you mostly miss it because you are focused on the words.

What People Get Wrong About It

A common mistake is treating this as proto-Lennon genius showing early signs of brilliance. It is not that. It is a bored twenty-three-year-old with access to a Penguin paperback contract and a typewriter doing whatever comes to mind. The value of the book is not in literary merit. It is historical. It shows what Lennon was reading, what he found funny, and what shaped his creative instincts before the Beatles took over the world. If you want analysis of Lennon's songwriting technique, this is not the place to look. If you want to understand the absurdity that ran through his head alongside the melodies, then yes, this is useful. Another misunderstanding is that the book is anti-war or deeply political. It is not. The political content is incidental at best. The humor is personal, surreal, and often cruel in a childish way. Reading it through a political lens will leave you disappointed. The book predates the phase where Lennon used art as activism by several years.

A Practical Problem and What Worked

When I was researching the Pete Shotton collaboration angle, I hit a wall with library copies because the ISBNs keep changing across reprints. The 1964 first edition ISBN is 0140042278, but reprints use different numbers and some listings mix them up. This caused me to order the wrong edition twice from a major bookseller before I figured out to check the copyright page directly rather than relying on the ISBN in the search field. Once I started asking sellers to confirm the imprint year on the copyright page, the problem went away. I also started using WorldCat to see which library held the exact edition I needed before ordering anything used. That cut my search time down from about forty minutes per book to roughly ten. This is for people who already like John Lennon and want to see the raw material behind his later work. It is not for casual readers looking for a good story. It is not for literary critics looking for depth. It is for fans who want to understand the context of Lennon's creative output and are okay with nonsense as the subject itself. If you can accept that the book is a time capsule rather than a masterpiece, you will get something out of it. If you cannot, you will finish it in an hour and feel mildly cheated, which is a perfectly reasonable reaction. The book remains in print because the demand is steady and predictable. It is not a cultural phenomenon that people discover years later and suddenly want to read. It is a niche item that sits on shelves next to Beatles biographies and gets picked up by the same small group of buyers every year. That is fine. It does not need to be more than that.