A rare Beatles album whose original cover art was recalled within days of its 1966 release is on sale for $5,000 at a Coral Gables record shop.

Fruit Fly Records, at 430 S. Dixie Hwy., Suite 205, is selling a copy of the Beatles' "Yesterday and Today" LP featuring the original "butcher cover" artwork. The image showed the band in white butcher smocks, surrounded by raw meat and dismembered plastic doll parts.

The cover didn't last long. Capitol Records printed roughly 750,000 copies before launching what it called "Operation Retrieve" on June 10, 1966, pulling the album from distributors. The recall cost Capitol $250,000 at the time.

Rather than reprint every sleeve, Capitol's pressing plants in Los Angeles and Scranton, Pennsylvania, pasted a new photo over the original artwork. Collectors call those sealed, pasted-over copies "second state." The copy at Fruit Fly is what's known as a "third state," where someone used steam to peel back the replacement image and reveal the butcher photo underneath.

"So with every decade that goes by, the number of copies like this one goes down and they just continue to become a collector's item," owner Giovanni Hanna told WSVN.

The $5,000 asking price falls within the documented range for peeled copies. Third-state versions sell for $500 to $5,000 depending on whether the pressing is mono or stereo, according to collector resource Rare Records. The WSVN report did not specify the Fruit Fly copy's format. Sealed second-state mono copies have fetched $5,000 to $7,000. A first-state cover sleeve without the record, once owned and autographed by Ringo Starr, sold at auction in 2015 for $25,600, according to Discogs.

British photographer Robert Whitaker shot the butcher photo on March 25, 1966, at his Chelsea, London, studio as part of a conceptual art piece he titled "A Somnambulant Adventure." The album hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for five weeks after its June 15, 1966, release.

Hanna is a University of Miami biology professor and geneticist who named the shop after his research subject. He started Fruit Fly Records in 2023 in a South Miami office park and moved to the larger Coral Gables space in November 2024, according to the Biscayne Times. The store specializes in rare vinyl and audio equipment, with a focus on jazz, Latin and global music.

Fruit Fly Records can be reached at (619) 565-4262.