The Beatles Autographs Cavern Club Paul McCartney John Lennon Ringo Signatures

Somewhere between teenage devotion and pop history, at a lunchtime session in the The Cavern Club, and through the sort of impulsive determination only a Beatle-mad schoolgirl could summon, these autographs began life on the back of a fan's hand. Later carefully lifted away with Sellotape and fixed into a scrapbook, the page is simply noted: Beatle autographs taken off my hand, after it was signed at the Cavern one lunchtime. It is as immediate and unfiltered as it sounds. No messages, nothing, just radio silence.

The page originates from'Cavernite', Sue Houghton's remarkable scrapbooks, largely compiled in 1963, before the rest of the world quite caught up. Long since broken up and dispersed, surviving fragments surface only occasionally, each carrying a little of that charged, intimate moment when the Beatles still felt within reach. Over the past couple of years I have been fortunate enough to gather a small handful of these relics: a sixpence given to Sue by George's mother before the Empire Theatre show in May'63, a piece of toast saved from the day of their final Cavern performance, a guitar string, and now this example. The autographs themselves are very heavily faded.

Please make sure you take the time to study the first picture to make sure you are happy with this. The second picture has been edited in photoshop and over exposed to make clearer. The third the autographs outlined. Time, adhesive and exposure have taken their toll, and what remains is faint and ghostlike. However, the remnants of ink are still just discernible with careful viewing; John, Paul and Ringo can be made out if the contrast is pushed and the eye allowed to adjust.

They are fragile survivals, but authentic to the moment and entirely consistent with their unusual method of preservation.

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