My grandmother, Nan Pollard, used illustrate coloring and children's books. She's done hundreds of the things, ranging from the Berenstien Bears coloring books to Planet of the Apes to Grizzly Adams to Lassie to Trolls, and my mother has a copy of nearly all of them in our house. One of the few that we didn't manage to have, however, is the Official Beatles Coloring Book. They made it in 1964, at the absolute height of Beatlemania. My mother was 15, and when she found out that while her parents were working on an official piece of merchandise for her beloved band, they could not manage to score her tickets to see them live in Chicago, so she locked herself in her room and cried for days. I love that story.
A few years back someone linked me a tshirt they found on Threadless, thinking that I would like it. The shirt had been stirring up some controversy because people were accusing the artists of tracing their design off of a Japanese Artist, but it's actually from a page of this coloring book! Nobody believed me when I told them that.
Yesterday a package arrived from my uncle Paul, and inside was a wonderful birthday present: A copy of the Beatles coloring book intact, with no pages missing or colored in. This is very hard to find, and I have been looking for a very long time for this. There are over 100 illustrations in this thing. I had it in my head that I would scan and post downloadable copies of every page so you could have your very own Beatles coloring book to enjoy, since I've always had a bear of a time finding scans of it online. The book is too old, however, to risk cracking the spine on every page to get it to lie flat enough to scan. I managed to scan a number of them in for you, however. So enjoy this wonderful little piece of greatness. Click on an image to get a large very printable version to color!
