Tony Booth

Anthony Booth (22 June 1933 – 11 January 2017) was a British commercial artist best known as the original poster artist for the Beatles and other bands in the Merseybeat era. He was known around Liverpool in the early 1960s as Brian Epstein's "right-hand man". Early years Born in 1933, Booth grew up in Moreton and was a wartime schoolboy. In 1948, at the age of 15, he won a scholarship in commercial art and design at the Wallasey School of Art and Crafts in Wallasey, Merseyside. After only 18 months at art school, he was offered his first position in a local commercial art studio which was also a printing, sign-writing and poster-writing company. Working for the Beatles and Brian Epstein During the early 1960s Booth worked in Liverpool city centre, near the Cavern Club and next door to the Beatles manager Brian Epstein's office. Booth did a lot of business with Epstein, producing posters, printed leaflets and a wide variety of publicity and display material. Booth produced hand-painted gig posters during the early sixties for many promoters, including Epstein, Sam Leach, Allan Williams and Cavern Club DJ -Bob Wooler. Booth would hand-paint many of the same poster using one-stroke brushes and liners with oil-based colours, mostly on white machine-glazed 'double-crown' 30"x20" poster paper. If Epstein required a larger number of posters for a specific event, then the original artwork would be sent to a local silk-screen printer for bulk printing and distribution and the same artwork was often used for leaflets and press adverts.