The Butcher Cover story started back in 1966 when the Beatles were commissioned for another photo shoot for their latest US LP, 'Yesterday... and Today', a mish-mash of songs from recent UK albums. The photographer hired was called Robert Whittaker, who was known to be a bit of an off-the-wall photographer. The Beatles started the photo session as normal and soon became bored of doing another 'Beatle thing'. Robert, sensing this, decided to spice up the photo shoot a little by digging out some butchers smocks, some slabs of meat and baby dolls. It was with this material that 12 photos were taken and developed.

Initially it was done to just relieve the boredom, but unfortunately Capitol didn't know this. They got hold of the butcher photos, and chose on one picture. This was to be the image used on their latest LP.

Initially, 750,000 copies were printed and mailed out to DJs and major music outlets for them to play the music and to get a sampling of the publics response, but instead of focusing on the music everybody focused on this album cover, commenting on how bad taste and offensive it was.

Capitol immediately began to recall all the copies it mailed out (with a couple leaking out into private collectors hands), and began the huge task of destroying them. Covers were either burned or buried at the local tip. Meanwhile, the Beatles were called back in for another photoshoot which churned out the more innocent looking Trunk Cover.

After Capitol had started destroying the covers, it soon transpired that it would cost a huge amount of money to destroy every single cover, and so a new idea had to be thought of. This idea resulted in simply pasting a new cover over the Butcher slick, hiding it forever. So the first batch of commerically released covers had the butcher slick underneath the new trunk slick.

When collectors got their copies of Yesterday... and Today, they tore the trunk cover off to see whether they had gotten an elusive butcher slick underneath. Those who did have a slick almost certainly ruined the butcher in the process.

Today it is almost impossible to pick up a Butcher Cover that has not had the replacement Trunk cover pasted on top of it. It is also very hard to find an original copy with the Trunk cover still pasted securely on top since so many did (and still do) tear it off to see if they had a Butcher underneath. Decent 3rd states are also incredibly collectible.