John Lennon's Glasses Expected To Fetch $1.5 Million At Auction

[matcom]

<snip>

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- A pair of gold-rimmed, wire sunglasses worn by Beatle John Lennon have come up for auction at a British Web site and could fetch more than $1.5 million, some media outlets reported on Monday.

The iconic glasses, put up for bid late last week at Web site 991.com, belonged to a Japanese television producer named Junishi Yore who said he was a translator for the Beatles in 1966, according to a description on the Web site.

Several media reports have put bids as high as $1.5 million, although that could not be confirmed in the private Web auction. Representatives of the site were not immediately available for comment. The auction is set to end on July 31.

The glasses come with Yore's handwritten note saying he got them when the Beatle was on tour in Japan. Lennon befriended Yore and before the two parted, they exchanged gifts. Lennon gave Yore his glasses. Yore gave Lennon copper cups.

Lennon wrote many of the Beatles songs along with Paul McCartney, and he was a leading anti-war activist in the Vietnam era. He was often photographed in his round, wire-rimmed glasses, and the image became iconic for young men and women of his generation who adopted the same look.

When Lennon was murdered outside his New York apartment in 1980, Yore pushed the lenses from the sunglasses in accordance with a Japanese tradition that calls for the glass to be displaced so that the soul can see in the afterlife.

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Music/07/16/lennon.glasses.reut/index.html

[underpants]

1. I don't think they worked