News | January 31, 2024

Beatles Signed Menu, Post-Breakup Contract, and Photos to Auction

Heritage Auctions

Beatles unused concert ticket for first US concert in Washington D.C.

On February 24, Heritage Auctions presents a 'Coming to America' 60th Anniversary Beatles auction that features significant autographs and signatures of the entire band including their last known sign-off on a record contract and an unused ticket to the band’s first U.S. concert, a copy of the White Album once owned by John Lennon and an original set of seven chromogenic color prints of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover session.

In 1964, American teenager Carol Hollenshead's dad met the Liverpool band on a flight - the February. 7 Pan Am flight 101 from London to New York - en route to their Stateside debut. During the flight, Carol’s dad snapped photos of the Beatles along with fellow fliers Phil Spector, Brian Epstein and Cynthia Lennon. The band and its small entourage signed the in-flight menu for him. While Carol has been a lifetime Beatles fan, she didn’t discover the menu and photos until last December, when, during a move, she found her father’s long-lost trove.

Other highlights include:

  • a handwritten letter from a young George Harrison to Beatles’ photographer and pal Astrid Kirchher along with a photo she took of him (in the letter Harrison writes about needing to learn a new song quickly)
  • a portfolio of seven color photographs taken for the Abbey Road album’s cover by Iain MacMillen signed by the photographer
  • an original affidavit supporting a trademark application registering the name "The Beatles" signed by Brian Epstein
  • a Chinese restaurant menu from Leeds, England that all four Beatles signed in 1963
  • also from 1963 a photographic print of the Beatles by Dezo Hoffman taken in London’s Soho Alley accompanied by 1963 signatures from all the Fab Four
  • a Paul McCartney-signed Please Please Me Mono LP vinyl sleeve
  • a 1962 Parlophone promo photo of the group during the EMI Love Me Do recording session signed by all four Beatles
  • a 1971 Imagine poster signed by John Lennon
Beatles original post break-up signed promotional contract
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Heritage Auctions

Beatles original post break-up signed promotional contract

Beatles signed Pan American Flight 101 menu
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Heritage Auctions

Beatles signed Pan American Flight 101 menu

First photo session with Ringo Starr at The Cavern Club
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Heritage Auctions

First photo session with Ringo Starr at The Cavern Club

George Harrison handwritten letter to Astrid Kirchherr
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Heritage Auctions

George Harrison handwritten letter to Astrid Kirchherr

The Gregg Oehlke Music Archive brings a number of the event’s lots. The longtime Detroit-area-based radio and music promoter started gathering Beatles memorabilia on the release of the White Album, and again in earnest in the 1980s. The Oehlke collection includes a John Lennon-signed Glass Onion publishing agreement, and a George Harrison-signed, cashed check from 1972.

The event presents a group of five original Beatle album cover and sleeve art designs signed and dated “1968” by American artist Jim Dine. Commissioned to commemorate Capitol Records' five-year anniversary of its first Beatles album release in the United States (Meet the Beatles! in 1964), these designs were created for a once-planned four-LP compilation set. 

The auction also features a Beatles photograph from the bands’ first photo session with Ringo Starr at The Cavern Club in August of 1962. Starr had only been an official member for a few days when the image was taken. Another extremely rare offering, a six-foot-long promotional NYC bus poster for John Lennon’s 1974 album Walls and Bridges that reads “Listen To This Bus.” The consigner says: “Back in November of '74 when a NYC bus stopped for a red light in front of my parent's apartment building on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, I ran over to the bus, easily slid the poster out, and have had it ever since. I kept it in a frame for just about all of the 50 years since I acquired it."

The auction's story arc of the band ends with what is one of the last known gatherings of all four Beatle signatures, an original post-break-up, hand-signed promotional contract. This is to date the last known Beatles record-promotion contract signed by all four members of the band. By 1975 the Beatles were no longer together but they still conducted business on behalf of Apple Corps Limited. This example states that Jackwill S.A. will handle the promotion of Apple Corps Limited throughout the world excluding England and Eire. Time duration for the contract is eight years for a fee of £40,000 per year beginning January 1, 1975.