TCG Letter #651 / Carpenter Letter #277

In August 1965 Ballantine Books produced the first ‘authorized’ American paperback of The Hobbit, without incorporating Tolkien’s revisions to the text. The cover picture showed a lion, two emus, and a tree with bulbous fruit. (When the book was reissued by Ballantine the following February, with the revised text, the lion had disappeared beneath yellow-green grass.)