"First State" Butcher Cover For Sale

In 1966, London photographer Robert Whitaker guided the Beatles through a photo shoot titled "A Somnambulant Adventure," in which he posed the Fab Four in butcher's smocks, draping them with cuts of meat and dismembered baby dolls.

Capitol Records used one of the pictures from the shoot (which had been previously used in Britain for the sleeve of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" single) as the cover art for the LP Yesterday and Today, pressing some 750,000 copies and distributing them to retailers across the United States.

The image--which Paul McCartney called "a comment on the [Vietnam] war"--aroused such controversy that Capitol recalled all unsold copies of Yesterday and Today, initially intending to destroy the covers. The company decided, however, to paste another cover over the offending image, and shipped the altered albums back to stores. Copies with the original cover art became, therefore, immediately collectible, prompting many to carefully remove (usually by steaming the cover) the pasted-on replacement image, revealing the original image underneath. Collectors identified these "butcher covers" as second state; first state, by contrast, are covers which never had the replacement photo, and are extremely rare.

Offered for sale on eBay: a rare, unopened, first state butcher cover, with the initial bid set at $9,200.