The Beatles Forever

I bought this book 1978 when I was 11 and it changed me. I recommend anyone picking this book up anywhere you can. Any beginning Beatles fan or an older one will like this book. Nicholas Schaffner touches on their history without treating them like Saints. The photos of the collectibles are worth the book.

He covers how the Beatles impacted our culture and some of the changes that took place. He covers the craziness of Beatlemania to the gradual maturing of The Beatles. Nicholas highlights each Beatle along with following the band as a whole.

It’s fun to see the many collectibles that flooded the market during Beatlemania. It has great pictures and enough content to keep you coming back to it. This book was updated after John Lennon was killed but any version is worth buying.

I’ve been rereading it recently and it holds up today well. Of course, history doesn’t change but more details have come out but overall the book is good. He follows their solo careers with honesty.

One thing to remember it’s not a straight history of the Beatles (it starts with Beatlemania) or a strict discography but more about the impact they had on the world with history and a highlighted discography on the way.

For a casual Beatle fan, you can’t go wrong with Nicholas Schaffner’s The Beatles Forever.

In 1979 my Jr. High School librarian knew I would read anything on baseball or the Beatles so she had me paged to the library and showed me this…theboysfromliverpool.jpg

again by Nicholas Schaffner and it’s great for a beginning Beatles fan. This would be a good starter book on The Beatles for a young teen.

 

 

Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player.

11 thoughts on “The Beatles Forever”

  1. What a great book. I am not sure my first Beatles book was either this one or Roy Carr’s The Beatles Illustrated Record- they came very close together.

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    1. It really is… I’ve been going through it in the past few weeks. A lot of my opinions were formed from this book. I remember the other one…The Boys from Liverpool to be good but just for a beginner. I had a great librarian.

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  2. That’s really cool about your librarian paging you when this came in. I just checked our library, and they don’t have it.
    This was published before England considered The Beatles to be national treasures. I noticed that when looking at some England picture books and travel books from the late 70s and early 80s. There’s no mention of the Beatles. It seems like such a short time later, that from no mention at all, we have “Liverpool John Lennon International Airport”, and countless other ways they are commemorated as part of what is England.

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    1. She was so good to me. I would read books about Babe Ruth and all the old baseball players and every Beatle related item they had…
      It took a while for England to catch up I guess. I think the mid-eighties is when it started. Liverpool of course has countless businesses built up on tours about them… I had no idea about the airport! I have to wonder what he would say about it… probably be amazed.

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  4. This was THE Beatles book in my house when I was a kid. My older brother bought it (of course), and I probably turned all its pages 50-times over as a child before finally reading it in my teens. I couldn’t help but stare at that picture of the Wedding Album cover – like a train wreck. I’ve been looking for a paperback copy like the one I grew up with, for posterity. Schaffner was a good writer who died too young.

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