Canberran's The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band collection including first press record and Royal Doulton mugs

With songs such as With a Little Help from My Friends, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and of course the title track, the album helped pave the way for rock and pop's subsequent expansion into the realm of artistic expression rather than simply a genre made up of bands who performed songs.

Meanwhile, the cover art itself is notoriously dense, with a total of 58 people pictured, including Albert Einstein, Shirley Temple, Lewis Carroll, and of course The Beatles themselves, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.

Fans came out in droves to get a piece of the album. It is still one of the best selling albums of all time, having sold more than 32 million copies. One of which was Canberra's Sandra Smith.

Having only moved to the capital a couple of years before, the mad Beatles fan bought the album just as it came out, bringing it back to her hostel to listen to it the first chance she got it.

"Everybody wanted to listen to it. It was very popular. And they weren't cheap at the time. So there weren't too many around," she says.

More than half a century later, Smith may not have a record player to play the album on anymore, but she has kept hold of the vinyl, despite having many offers to buy it over the years. And Beatles fans will pay decent money for a second-hand record. First presses of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band such as this one on eBay can go between $100 to $300.

What is more valuable - not to mention, rarer than the album itself - is what Smith has placed next to her copy of the album: four collectable Royal Doulton Beatles mugs - one of each member of the band - plus a fifth, special edition version of John Lennon, released after his death in 1980.

A complete set - minus the special edition - can go for more than $1000 on collectables sites, meanwhile, the special edition Lennon mug, which sees the singer in a different coloured jacket to the original, can go for $750 or more, as there were only ever 1000 made.

Not that Smith is planning on selling any time soon - or at all. It is merely a display of love that she has for the band, aided by her business in the 80s that saw her selling Royal Doulton items.

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"When the Beatles mugs came out, I think it was 1984, I had more orders than I could get mugs," she says.

"They were selling at a reasonable price - probably about $50 a mug. But now they're selling for quite a lot more, as you can imagine, because they only started making them in 1984 and stopped in 1991. And the demand was much greater than the output.

"I used to get them from a dealer that I used to use in England in Sheffield. And then in 1987 they made a special limited edition of John Lennon and this was a limited edition of 1000 worldwide and I could only get one because the dealer in England that I dealt with said only one mug per person, no matter where you are in the world. He said he had demand for about 10 times more than I could sell."

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