Rare Copy of the Beatles’ White Album Sold for $36K

Rare Copy of the Bea­t­les’ White Album Sold for $36K

An ultra-rare copy of the Bea­t­les’ White Album has fetched £19,201, or nearly $36,000 CDN, on eBay, mak­ing the buyer the proud new owner of one the world’s rarest records of all time.

As pre­vi­ously reported, ear­lier this month the first copy of the album not to go to one of the Bea­t­les them­selves — the record with the ser­ial num­ber 0000005 — went up for sale online, with open­ing bids revolv­ing around the $2,000 mark.

John Lennon, Paul McCart­ney, George Har­ri­son and Ringo Starr got the White Album copies num­bered 0000001 to 0000004. But since it doesn’t appear these will enter pub­lic cir­cu­la­tion any­time soon, Record Col­lec­tor ranked this mint 1968 mono dou­ble LP of 0000005 as #1 in its list of the “200 Rarest Records of All Time.”

The win­ning bid­der has cho­sen not to reveal his or her iden­tity and to remain anony­mous. How­ever, we have a few guesses on who the win­ner could be:

    — Pete Best
    — George Mar­tin
    — Jimmy Nicol
    — Yoko
    — Sean Lennon (Mom won’t let him play with dad’s)
    — Some sad guy in his base­ment who sees the light of day twice a year

By Brock Thiessen
24 Novem­ber 2008