Garrod and Lofthouse were a British printing company based in Chaldon Road, Caterham, Surrey, who manufactured record sleeves.
[3] The advantage of these sleeves, in the days of single colour printing, was that the four-colour front was printed on a separate sheet to the single colour back and the two halves were then glued together as the sleeve was fabricated.
This allowed half the number of passes through a printing press to produce the front cover, and a quarter for the monochrome backs.
[4] Garrod and Lofthouse printed for most UK record companies outside Decca, and manufactured covers for France through a subsidiary Imprimerie du Nord.
They were given special permission to press the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet (one of the first gatefold sleeves) and Sticky Fingers (manufactured with a metal zip glued down the front), as Decca's in-house staff could not manage the complex production to the volume required.