Correct. When it comes to these editions I have no willpower 😄.
Apart from HoMe, this series is the only one I have bought to get them all in the same style. All my other Tolkien books are a complete hodge-podge of whatever was out there when I mostly bought Tolkien books in my teens and tweens - and there was a lot less around back in the ‘80s.
72 different titles so far, I think.
I shared the link to the interactive Middle-earth map someone on Reddit is creating with my local Tolkien fans. They said it was great, but wished someone could make Barbara Strachey’s maps interactive.
I had introduced them to this book as it’s a great accompaniment to use side-by-side with any LotR read. This is especially true in the earliest years of re-reads. I found it invaluable 45 years ago.
Does anyone have any idea how often these versions come up for sale?
Would you pay £8k for it?
September 2025 auction sale.
This may be of interest. Not really my forte, but I think it's ok.
(Music is the theme tune to BBC Radio 4's wonderful 1981 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings by Brian Sibley.)
Thirty years late, and many hundreds of pounds more expensive that it would have been if I hadn't been an idiot after Morgoth's Ring came out in 1993, I have finally completed a full set of first editions for The History of Middle-earth. Book 1 is only a third impression as it took me a while to spot these after they first started to be published in 1983 - in fact I think I only spotted them for the first time in Waterstones in Croydon in 1987. The fact that Books 2 - 10, bought as new, are all first editions, first impressions presumably indicates how slowly they sold and why some of the stock of the earliest editions were apparently pulped - sales only averaging 25 per annum. This is probably down to The Book of Lost Tales Parts 1 and 2, the latter especially, being very academic reads. I originally DNF'ed Book 2 about a third of the way in and it took me another 29 years before I read any of them again, starting with Book 10 following The Tolkien Society's conference celebrating the life of Christopher Tolkien in late 2024. It was only then I finally realised what I had been missing out on - and what a total numbskull I had been to stop buying them. (Mind you, this was 16 years before the Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens films came out and created a massively expanded fan base across the world.)
I only decided to try to track down first editions of Books 11 and 12 this year and their previous owners obviously didn't keep them quite as well I have done, judging from the yellowing of some of the pages, and also a long tear in the dust cover spine of Book 12. The dust cover spines for Books 7 and 9 have also both faded quite badly on my own bookshelves, so they are far from pristine but I think a full set is relatively rare and I'm very, very happy about finally completing the set.