Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on the 26th of May 1967 in the UK and on the 2nd of June 1967 in the United States. It was the first Beatles album to carry identical track listings in both the UK and US versions.
Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth designed the cover, with art direction by Robert Fraser and photography by Michael Cooper. The finished collage included 57 photographs and nine waxworks of famous figures, at a final cost of nearly £3,000.
The final production cost was approximately £25,000. Engineer Geoff Emerick estimates the group spent around 700 hours recording the album, compared with the £400 and a fraction of the time spent on their first album, Please Please Me.
Sgt. Pepper won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year. It was the first rock LP to receive the Album of the Year honour.
The Beatles permanently retired from live performance at the end of August 1966 after a US tour marked by reduced ticket sales, logistical dangers in Japan and the Philippines, and the growing impossibility of reproducing their studio arrangements on stage. George Harrison had told manager Brian Epstein he was leaving the band, and was persuaded to stay only on the assurance that there would be no more tours.
More than 32 million copies had been sold worldwide as of 2011. In the UK, the album sold 250,000 copies in its first seven days on sale, and it was the best-selling album in the UK for both 1967 and the decade as a whole.