John Lennon Handwritten Manuscript Poem for “Bernice’s Sheep” from “A Spaniard in the Works” 1965

A single page of medium-weight cream paper bearing Lennon's poem "Bernice's Sheep," written out in blue ballpoint with the title added at the foot of the page. This is the complete and original manuscript as published in A Spaniard in the Works on 24 June 1965 (pages 72–75) — twenty-five lines across five numbered five-line stanzas, carrying just a single correction in Lennon's hand. The poem is a lullaby sung by a girl, Bernice, to a sheep — "This night I lable down to sleep / with hefty heart and much saddened / with all the bubbles of the world / bratting my boulders / oh dear sheep..." — its title a pun on the Bernese sheepdog.

Here Lennon folds his love of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear into parody and satire, working in a language, rhythm and spelling entirely his own. "All I'm trying to do is tell a story," he said, "and what the words is spelt like is irrelevant really. But if they make you laugh because the word used to be spelt like that, that's great. But the thing is the story. And the sound of the word." The book's title is itself a Lennon play on the phrase "a spanner in the works."

Lennon discussed the difficulty of writing it in a BBC Tonight interview on 18 June 1965, days before publication. Though he had written since before he owned a guitar, he explained, it had only ever been a hobby, and until meeting his publisher Tom Maschler he had never thought of putting it into print: "If I hadn't been a Beatle I just wouldn't have thought of having the stuff published... I might've been a Beat poet." A Spaniard in the Works proved far harder going than his first book, In His Own Write (1964) — the fruit of years — now written against a publisher's deadline: "The publisher rang up and said, 'Have you written anything yet?' and I said 'No, I've been writing songs', because I can't do both at once..." Squeezed between songwriting, touring and filming Help!, it would be the last book he published as a Beatle.

More ambitious than its predecessor and sharper in its targets, the book marked a maturing writer. "A Spaniard in the Works gave me another personal boost," Lennon said. "The book is more complicated; there are some stories and bits in it that even I don't understand... I like writing, and I'd go on writing even if there wasn't any publisher daft enough to publish them." He rarely revised — as this near-clean manuscript bears out. "I hardly ever alter anything," he told Wilfred De'Ath on the BBC's World of Books on 16 June 1965. "Once I've written it, I like it... I might add things when I go over it before it's published, but I seldom take anything out" — a method, he suggested, much like his studio work: "write it, see it released very quickly, then move on."

From the collection of Tom Maschler, Lennon's publisher. Handwritten published manuscripts in Lennon's hand are, like his Beatles lyrics, supremely rare — and this is an important artefact of his acclaimed literary work, composed at the very height of Beatlemania.

The poem comes with an additional COA from Tracks

The page Measures 25.4 x 17.8

The condition of the page is excellent