Alternate Abbey Road photo makes headlines

And I have to admit I am very puzzled about why. This is clearly a non-news story. The London-based Bloomsbury auctions have put an estimate of £7000-9,000 on it in an upcoming auction. And they are calling it a conservative estimate…

The 18in by 18in picture is one of 25 prints made from the original frame and has been owned by a private music memorabilia collector who bought it from a gallery ten years ago. He has now decided to sell the print, and London-based Bloomsbury has got the job. Sarah Wheeler, of Bloomsbury Auctions in London, says the images have been seen before (imagine that!), though she said, “they haven’t kind of worldwide exposure” that the original cover photo has. Well I don’t know that. The alternate cover photo they are putting up for sale is the best known of them, since HMV used it on the front cover of their boxed edition of “Abbey Road” on CD back in 1987. And on the front cover of the accompanying booklet. And as a poster. These boxed sets were for sale in HMV stores on the same release day as the regular edition of the CD and only cost one pound more than the regular one.

The same photo adorned the HMV box, booklet and poster from the 1987 CD edition release of Abbey Road

She also said the photo, to her knowledge, had not been auctioned before. “It might have been in some small, weird music auctions, but it’s never been sold by an international auction house before,” she said.

Small weird music auction? What kind of research do these people do? Hello? Only last year, Snap galleries in London were selling the remaining stock of limited prints from all five of the outtake photos, all signed by the photographer and no one paid much attention to it, but now one single photo emerges from someone’s collection and it’s all over the news???????

As well as offering some of the signed and numbered limited edition photographs for sale, Snap galleries also offered a freshly printed complete set of six photographs (five front cover outtakes plus the back cover). They also staged an exhibition called “Beatles and Bystanders“, which ran from 13th April to 8th July 2011.

Now this “new find” is in The Sun, it’s in The Guardian, it’s on NBC, even Beatles Examiner makes a fuzz about it! I guess a single outtake photo is more newsworthy than all five of them.

The auction takes place on 22 May. I can say no more. Link to auction.