Beatles – The Beatles

Description

The album features 30 songs, 19 of which were written during March and April 1968 at a Transcendental Meditation course in Rishikesh, India. The album has been certified 24× platinum by the RIAA.

Pop artist Richard Hamilton designed the record sleeve in collaboration with McCartney. Hamilton’s design was in stark contrast to Peter Blake’s vivid cover art for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and consisted of a plain white sleeve. The band’s name, in Helvetica, was crookedly blind embossed slightly below the middle of the album’s right side. Later vinyl record releases in the US showed the title in grey printed (rather than embossed) letters. Each copy of the record featured a unique stamped serial number, “to create”, in Hamilton’s words, “the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies”. In 2008, an original pressing of the album with serial number 0000005 sold for £19,201 on eBay. In 2015, Ringo Starr’s personal copy number 0000001 sold for a world record $790,000 at auction.

The sleeve included a poster comprising a montage of photographs, with the lyrics of the songs on the back, and a set of four photographic portraits taken by John Kelly. The photographs for the poster were assembled by Hamilton and McCartney, and sorted them in a variety of ways over several days before arriving at the final result.

During production, the album had the working title of A Doll’s House. This was changed when the English progressive rock band Family released the similarly titled Music in a Doll’s House earlier that year.