Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on the 26th of May 1967. The album topped the Record Retailer albums chart for 23 consecutive weeks from the 10th of June 1967 and held the number one position on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the US for 15 weeks from the 1st of July to the 13th of October 1967.
Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth designed the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. The cover features a colorful collage of the Beatles in costume standing with life-sized cardboard cut-outs of famous people and includes 57 photographs and nine waxworks.
The final cost of the album was approximately 25,000 pounds, which was 30 times the cost of their first album Please Please Me. The cover art alone cost nearly 3,000 pounds, an extravagant sum for a time when album covers typically cost around 50 pounds.
John Lennon drew inspiration for the lyrics from a Daily Mail report on potholes in the Lancashire town of Blackburn and an article in the same newspaper relating to the death of Beatles friend and Guinness heir Tara Browne. The song consists of four verses by Lennon, a bridge, two aleatoric orchestral crescendos, and an interpolated middle part written and sung by Paul McCartney.
The Beatles officially retired from touring in August 1966 due to exhaustion and the reality that their live performances had become mere tribal rites rather than musical events. John Lennon declared they could send out four waxworks to satisfy crowds while Paul McCartney and George Harrison grew weary of exhausting itineraries that included threats of violence in the Philippines and the mobilization of 35,000 police officers in Japan.
In 1968, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, which was the first rock LP to receive this honor. The album was also inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2003 for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.