Tuesday, April 8, 2025: David McKnight, Bits and Pieces: Scrapbooking The Beatles: A Fan’s Passion or Obsession? A Study of Beatle Fandom with Examples from the David McKnight Beatles Collection

SCRB 0023 UK 7 vols.

“Collecting is the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary the user and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or Experiences.” — Russell W. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society

Over sixty years ago, The Beatles arrived in America on February 7, 1964. The term Beatlemania had already been coined in England three months and the mania erupted in America after the obscure musical group appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. The band performed before a live audience of 728 in the television studio and an estimated 73 million viewers watched the group sing five songs and the rest is history. I was among those who were glued to the tv set that night as I am sure other of you were. Not surprisingly, the bopper fans went wild and satisfied their appetites for their records and the dizzying array of Fab Four related products that filled Woolworth Stores across North America, Great Britain and beyond. Although The Beatles recording career lasted a scant seven years: 1963 - 1970; the Liverpool group achieved international stardom; their records continue to sell, books and magazines examine continue to explore the history of the group, its members and legacy.

Set aside the fact that thousands of books, newspapers, magazines have been published since 1963. The Woolworth Beatle products are now collectibles as are many of the books and magazines that are considered “vintage.” As an originalist fan - someone who saw the Beatles on Ed Sulvian - for me it was an epiphany as it was for many others, like many young male teen my fanaticism focused on the music, I imagined myself with brown hair (not blond curly), holding a guitar and singing or forming a rock group like the Liverudlians. With little money (no weekly allowance) I struggled to buy the next great Beatles Album. I still have those albums, but nothing survives of the posters and other bits and pieces I owned at the time.

A year after the Beatles broke up, I continued my adolescent peregrinations and flew to England in search of ? and settled in Liverpool for a year. When I mentioned the Beatles to my new companions, their response was “The Beatles who cares!” indeed! Significantly, during the 1970s, Beatlemania was transformed into a global nostalgia machine which continues to excite the passions of old and new Beatles fans with collectibles. It is an industry that generates millions of dollars annually. And it should be noted that all four Beatles have been royally rewarded for their talents.

In 2000, I acquired a copy of Anthology, a beautifully illustrated folio history of the Beatles as told by the band members themselves. (It accompanied the 1995 three volume six cd set and five-volume documentary. The book triggered my nostalgia for the band. But I was still focused on collecting Canadian poetry! In 2012 I shipped my Canadian Poetry Collection to the University of Alberta in Canada. Since then, I have filled a hundred plus shelves with my Beatles collection and the boxes are neatly stacked. As the collection has evolved, it began as a kind of trophy collection of high-end limited-edition books published by Genesis Publishing in England. The next iteration of my collection focused on text and image: the trail of photo books documenting the Icons of the century is amazing. Creating the Beatles print culture research collection seemed admirable. However, more recently, I have turned left at Greenland and I have expanded the collection to include what I describe as the fan experience dating from 1963 to the present. 

Among the evidence I have collected to illustrate and document the fan experience, I have expanded my collection to include: The Beatle Fan Club correspondence, photographs and announcements; fanzines; fan correspondence; fan fests and scrapbooks. Since purchasing my first scrapbook in 2017, the number has increased to 50 different compilers represented in 150 plus volumes. They hail from six countries including Belgium, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States. The date range is 1963 to 2018. In my presentation, I will provide a more detailed description of the scrapbooks, their creators and their artifactual documentary value to better understand the private fan experience and the residual riches that Beatle fanatics pasted into their scrapbooks for future collectors to possess and researchers to explore.

David McKnight is the former Director of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Mr. McKnight possesses a BA in Classics and History (McGill University, Montreal, 1985), an MLIS (McGill University, Montreal, 1992) and an MA in English Literature (Concordia University, Montreal, 1993). Prior to coming to the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, McKnight was the Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Head of the Digital Collections Program at McGill University Libraries. He worked for McGill Libraries for fifteen years. McKnight possesses a particular knowledge and interest in the history of late 19th and 20th century avant-garde literature, art and publishing. Recently he curated two major exhibitions, Experiment: Printing the Canadian Imagination (University of Alberta, 2018) and Wise Men Fished Here: A Centenary Exhibition in Honor of the Gotham Book Mart: 1920 – 2020 (Kislak Center for Special Collections, 2019). In 2021, McKnight co-edited Cross-Cultural Pound (Clemson University Press, 2021) with John G. Gery and Walter Baumann. In 2023, McKnight edited a catalog of Andy Warhol Screen prints, entitled Out of Sight: A Collector, A Discovery and Andy Warhol (Penn Libraries). He is a lifelong Beatles fan and collector thereof.