Another Chapter in History of the Beatles : Pop music: The group stands alone with sales of an estimated 1.2 million copies of the new ‘Anthology’ album, the highest first-week total ever recorded.

“The Beatles Anthology, Vol. I” possibly sold up to 1.2 million copies last week, which is believed to be the highest first-week total ever in the record business, the head of EMI Records said Monday.

The question is how many of those “Anthology” sales will be formally reflected in figures collected by SoundScan, whose monitoring of U.S. sales is used as the official record industry standard.

Charles Koppelman, chairman and CEO of EMI Records Group of North America, predicted that SoundScan, which will release its figures Wednesday, will report sales of between 800,000 and 1 million. Koppelman estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 additional copies of the Beatles album were sold in stores, including supermarkets and discount outlets, not counted by SoundScan.

That still gives the Beatles a chance to break the first-week SoundScan sales mark of 950,000 copies set by Pearl Jam’s “Vs.” in 1993.

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Based on an average selling price of between $23 and $25, the album could have generated more than $25 million in the United States alone.

“We’ve been on the phone all morning with retailers and everyone I spoke to said they’ve never seen a record react like this,” Koppelman said.

While album sales weren’t monitored by an independent agency prior to 1991 when SoundScan was adopted, it is doubtful that any album approached the $25-million mark in its first week in the stores, industry observers said.

The Beatles package is expected to easily shatter the first-week SoundScan sales record for a double album. The current record of 391,000 copies was set last summer by Michael Jackson’s “HIStory.”

“We’ve seen an unprecedented response by the consumer,” said Gary Arnold, merchandise manager for Best Buy, a 251-store, Minneapolis-based chain. “It’s like it’s 1964 all over again.”

And Beatles fans, primed by ABC-TV’s highly publicized three-part documentary, didn’t go into stores just for “Anthology,” which includes previously unreleased rarities and a “new” Beatles song. EMI’s Koppelman estimated that up to 500,000 copies of older Beatles albums were also sold last week. “Our reorders on the catalogue have been staggering.”

Koppelman and the EMI staff wasn’t just toasting the Beatles success Monday. They expect Garth Brooks’ new “Fresh Horses” album to come in second in Wednesday’s SoundScan report with sales of up to 500,000 copies.

“If it weren’t for the Beatles, everybody would be talking about Garth today,” Koppelman said.

Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn contributed to this story.