Not the only one: how Yoko Ono helped create John Lennon’s Imagine

On 29 January 1971, a letter was sent to a stately home in Berkshire confirming a bulky delivery, a birthday present for the buyer’s wife – a grand piano, spray-painted white and costing £1,891. Later that year, a photograph of the buyer playing the instrument would be turned into a poster folded inside his new album. After that, it would also feature in a memorable music film. The exalted status of this piano was established, some would say, in May 1971, when John Lennon used it for the recording of the title song for the LP Imagine.

This letter from Steinway & Sons is featured in , a luxurious scrapbook about the making of what is arguably John Lennon’s best-known and most-loved solo album. Beatles geeks will salivate over it. Here journalist Craig McGregor’s accusations that the Beatles imitated and (“It wasn’t a rip-off, it was a love in”) and another to Paul and Linda McCartney some time after the Beatles’ break-up that nearly boils over with rage (“I was reading your letter,” Lennon begins, “and wondering which middle-aged cranky Beatles fan wrote it”).