New books inspire Beatle mania all over again

I was in seventh grade when I began poring over Beatles books. That was shortly after I'd gotten the "Red" and "Blue" double-record compilations and started methodically, obsessively, buying album after album. The Beatles had broken up years earlier, and I couldn't help but be vexed that I'd never enjoyed the thrill of hearing a groundbreaking new Beatles album at the time it came out.

So the books were my ticket to experience some of that excitement. In those pre-Wikipedia days, titles such as "The Beatles: An Illustrated Record" and "All Together Now: The First Complete Beatles Discography: 1961-1975" were invaluable resources.

Today, of course, you can read individual Wikipedia entries on pretty much every Beatles song, album, film and live appearance, and each year the market becomes more glutted with Beatles books, many of which are finding new ways to repackage old information.

The package really is the selling point for Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin's "All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Beatles Release" (Black Dog & Leventhal, $50). This handsome, heavy, hardcover book is packed with full-page photos and organized chronologically by album. It appears to contain no new research; the footnotes cite sources such as Mark Lewisohn's "The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions" and The Beatles' own "The Beatles Anthology" oral history. The Beatles snob in me desires more in a book than what's already been published, but the seventh-grade me would have devoured this.

The balance between presentation and content is even more skewed in Mat Snow's "The Beatles Solo" (Race Point, $50), which chronicles the foursome's post-breakup years. The cover, boasting elegant line-art illustrations of each Beatle, is actually a box containing four thin hardcover volumes, each summing up a solo Beatle's career and life in 91 pages (plus index). This uniform length makes little sense: You can't detail Paul McCartney's highly active 40-plus solo years in the same amount of space as John Lennon's tragically shortened post-Beatles decade. Then again, given the large type and abundance of photos, none of these books offers much more depth than you'd find in an article in the literate music magazine Mojo, which Snow used to edit.

In contrast, "The John Lennon Letters" (Little, Brown, $25), edited by Hunter Davies (with cooperation from Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono) and recently issued in paperback, offers a treasure trove of revelatory visual and written material. Lennon was a great letter writer and did much whimsical drawing and scribbling on these missives. With the letters and postcards reproduced and transcribed, you can open this book to any page and find something that draws you closer to the artist.

Another book that pushes the ball forward is Kevin Howlett's "The Beatles: The BBC Archives 1962-70" (Harper Design, $60), which chronicles the band's many BBC performances and prints interviews with its members, all in a coffee-table-worthy book that comes in a faux reel-to-reel tape box. It offers a revealing series of interviews, moving from the band's fresh-faced, happy-to-be-here days to their been-through-the-wringer later years.

The most anticipated of the new Beatles releases is Lewisohn's "Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, Vol. 1" (Crown Archetype, $40). The first of three planned volumes, it offers 803 pages of narrative plus another 129 of end notes and index (plus three photo sections) to take the band's history to the end of 1962, with the group's debut album lurking around the corner.

Lewisohn takes a studiously journalistic approach here, combing through the many interviews The Beatles and their contemporaries have given and conducting new ones when possible. (He had interviewed McCartney and Harrison before, though not specifically for this book.) It isn't his mission to present the material in the most dramatic way possible; we're not treated to re-created dialogue and scenes crafted as if in a movie, and we're always aware that we're viewing these characters from the outside. What he does is set the record straight and offer the most detailed, accurate account of The Beatles' early years available to date -- one that should stand as definitive for years to come.