Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
The Beatles Are Coming! covers the Beatles' first visit to the United States and the events leading up to the group's arrival on February 7, 1964. It is the most thorough and accurate book ever published on how Beatlemania evolved in America. The book details why Capitol Records turned down the Beatles four times before finally agreeing to release their records. It tells the stories of two small companies, Vee-Jay and Swan, who issued the group's records without success in 1963. It details the American media coverage of the Beatles in late 1963, when Beatlemania was viewed as a curious fad happening in England that could never catch on in the United States. It explains how the Beatles were booked for The Jack Paar Program and The Ed Sullivan Show, as well as two concerts at Carnegie Hall. The book concludes with stories and pictures of the Beatles historic first U.S. visit in February, 1964. The book contains over 450 images, including many previously unpublished photos of the Beatles. Foreword by Walter Cronkite.
A fabulous, fabulous, fabulous, fabulous book. -- Time.com, February 7, 2004
A lavishly illustrated, carefully researched, fine-graned examination of the Beatles' first visit and everything leading up to it. -- The New York Times, February 6, 2004
A thoroughly researched entertaining account of the group's first U.S. visit, full of interesting and little known stories. -- Walter Cronkite, from the foreword
Expansive and authoritative...The definitive story of the year leading up to homegrown Beatlemania, with hundreds of photos and documents. -- The Washington Post, January 30, 2004
Remarkable...an easy-reading, visually stunning package. -- Beatlefan, Jan-Feb 2004
The definitive historical account of how the Beatles truly conquered America. Beatles Book of the Year...2004. -- Goldmine, March 19, 2004
All copies are new and in excellent condition.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"She thinks I'm a fascist? I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce!" —Margot Robbie as Barbie in Barbie (2023)
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He is currently launching a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater.
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.