<P> The Beatles was the last Beatles album to be mixed separately for stereo and mono, though the mono version was issued only in the UK and a few other countries . All but one track exist in official mono mixes; the exception is "Revolution 9", which was a direct reduction of the stereo master . The Beatles had not been particularly interested in stereo until this album, but after receiving mail from fans stating they bought both stereo and mono mixes of earlier albums, they decided to make the two different . Several mixes have different track lengths; the mono mix / edit of "Helter Skelter" eliminates the fade - in at the end of the song (and Starr's ending scream), and the fade out of "Yer Blues" is 11 seconds longer on the mono mix . </P> <P> In the US, mono records were already being phased out; the US release of The Beatles was the first Beatles LP to be issued in stereo only . In the UK, the following album, Yellow Submarine, was the last to be shipped in mono . The mono version of The Beatles was made available worldwide on 9 September 2009, as part of The Beatles in Mono CD boxed set . A reissue of the original mono LP was released worldwide in September 2014 . </P> <P> The album's sleeve was designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, in collaboration with McCartney. Hamilton's design was in stark contrast to Peter Blake's vivid cover art for Sgt . Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and consisted of a plain white sleeve . The band's name, in Helvetica, was crookedly blind embossed slightly below the middle of the album's right side, and the cover also featured a unique stamped serial number, "to create", in Hamilton's words, "the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies". In 2008, an original pressing of the album with serial number 0000005 sold for £ 19,201 on eBay . In 2015, Ringo Starr's personal copy number 0000001 sold for a world record $790,000 at auction . </P> <P> Later vinyl record releases in the US showed the title in grey printed (rather than embossed) letters . The album included a poster comprising a montage of photographs, with the lyrics of the songs on the back, and a set of four photographic portraits taken by John Kelly during the autumn of 1968 that have themselves become iconic . The photographs for the poster were assembled by Hamilton and McCartney, and sorted them in a variety of ways over several days before arriving at the final result . </P>

List of songs on the white album beatles