The Smiley Smile Message Board

I should really know this, but how many original Smle gatefold (w/ booklet, right?) covers were printed up and what happened to all of them? Does anyone have one or ever seen one? I would....... uh.... do something bad for one of those.

Don't think the sleeves were to be gatefold -  the booklet would have slipped inside. I doubt anyone on this board, with perhaps one exception, has ever had an original... and he maybe lost his in a divorce. If he's reading I'm sure he'll speak up!

Between 400,000 and 500,00 front cover slicks were printed, but no back covers:  the closest approach to a finished (non-gatefold) cover was a series of mockups made by the Capitol art dept for the band to give the once-over. I know of one that used to be in private hands some years ago.

400,000 booklets were printed, and almost all of them were pulped and dumped in a NJ landfill in 1969. Maybe six to ten still exist: one's in the R&R Museum in Cleveland, and I think the rest are in private hands (I know where three are, or were a few years ago)

466,000 copies of the cover and 419,000 Smile booklets were printed.  The cover was only the slick, as Andrew mentions - it was apparently never pasted onto an actual cardboard cover.

My understanding is that Frank Holmes, who had loaned the Rock & Roll Museum his copy for a limited time, had to make a special trip to demand it be returned (sometime in '97, I believe). I saw it there the first year the museum was open (1996?), but it hasn't been on display since, which makes me think they don't have a copy (the PET SOUNDS master tape box, on the other hand, is almost always on display, so I think that item is part of the permanent collection).

Thanks - I stand corrected.

There probably isn't much proof one way or another but the memo that supposedly describes SMiLE covers in two Capitol production center warehouses probably means smile front liners [slicks] and back liners glued to cardboard jackets just by the fact that they are in a Capitol production warehouse.

According to Gene Voris [from the Capitol memos] and Richard Roth [fromer exec at Queens Litho and assistant to Barry Cohen of the Capitol memos] the process at that time was:

 Art for front and back liners produced by Capitol and front liner art delivered to litho printers; Bertco and Queens in SMiLE's case.

Back liner art [with the tracklist] shipped to a jacket fabricators/assemblers to be printed in black on white by the assemblers; Bertco and an unknown fabricator used by Queens.

Litho companies printed color front liners and the back liners were printed by album jacket fabricator/assemblers and both were assembled to cardboard jackets and shipped as a completed item to Capitol. As I understand it, this was done as a single process to produce a single item; the booklet was another single process to produce a single item. I don't think it is likely that only front liners were produced and then shipped to Capitol. Don't have any proof, haven't seen the documentation with my own eyes, except Mike's witness:

"Capitol finished the sleeve in April already. I don't know how many sleeves they can throw out now just because the lineup of songs and some songs have changed completely."