Lennon: His Life and Work / by James Henke

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Softcover.

This book needed to be both birthday celebration and memorial, since it was produced for an exhibition we designed on the 60th anniversary of Lennon’s birth and the 20th anniversary of his death. We wanted it to focus on Lennon as a literary artist, hence the readerly size of the book. We also wanted it to have an intimate and more modest sense of scale; the look and feel was meant to downplay the celebrity quotient. The white-on-white grid of holes in the cover represents absence and presence, markers and voids. The work of Yoko Ono—her Fluxus projects as well as her collaborations with Lennon—figured prominently in our thinking about the show and the book. The white and honey-colored palette is based on the Milk and Honey album they created together.