FastCompany Magazine

As the story goes, when John Lennon was writing “I Am the Walrus,” he received a letter from a student at his former primary school explaining that the English teacher there had given his pupils the task of decoding and analyzing Beatles lyrics. So, in true Lennon fashion, he resolved to make his new song as inscrutable as possible, including nonsensical lines about yellow custard and dead dog eyes adapted from a nursery rhyme he sang as a child. The song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, might seem like a similarly obtuse flight of fancy, but it was actually inspired by—and, in many cases, lifted wholesale from—a Victorian circus poster Lennon had picked up at an antiques shop some time earlier. Peter Dean, a modern-day Beatles fanatic, wanted a copy of that poster for his own wall, but all he could find were crappy reproductions. So, with the dedication of a true zealot, he set about re-creating it on his own.