We would like to thank the contributors for their hard work and their patience, and Zhang Pinggong and Malcolm Henson for their work on the index. David would like to thank Joanne for being such a fabulous co-editor, and Mark, Jon, Daisy and Ruth, as ever. Joanne would like to thank everyone at NTU who made her ‘admin relief’ possible and to thank Ben, who ended up doing more than his fair share of office hours on the food module while the book got completed. Thanks, as usual, to Mark. I am VERY grateful for David’s willingness to do the ‘techie stuff’ on the book – without this, it’s quite likely it wouldn’t exist! We would also like to thank those individuals and organizations who gave permission to use copyright material. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission to publish copyright material; the editors and publishers will gladly receive any information enabling them to rectify any error or omission in subsequent editions.

This book, first published in 1987, has been out of print for a while. We are grateful to our present publisher for suggesting that it might be revived. As with our similar collections on Bob Dylan and David Bowie, our aim has been to present 'classic' material of enduring interest. Our take on Lennon has not changed and we have not wanted to revamp The Lennon Companion so as to make it appear falsely contemporary. That said, we have updated the bibliography and discography, and a substantial afterword contextualizes recent developments, looking back with older, if not necessarily wiser, eyes—and ears. A full forty years on from The Beatles' conquest of America, Lennon's legacy resonates still. 'When you get to the top, there is nowhere to go but down', wrote poet Philip Larkin some twenty years ago, 'but The Beatles could not get down. There they remain, unreachable, frozen, fabulous'. Lennon most of all.