Awesomebooks

I do hope details on the deluxe come out soon.

I have been very pleased by Awesomebooks so far and will most likely pre-order with them again.

The following message was sent by David Brawn at HarperCollins to a collector who had received a damaged copy of The History of The Hobbit. With the permission of the recipient and David, I am sharing it here as well. It gives a very good glimpse behind the curtain of some decisions past and future, as well as confirming that a deluxe illustrated Hobbit is coming later this year. Most importantly, that deluxe edition will be using a different printer in response to recent criticisms of quality control for the prior deluxe editions. Bold emphasis and slight editing done by me for clarity.

• The black ink blot on your copy of The History of The Hobbit took us all by surprise. It is very rare to see such an occurrence in a book – I have been Tolkien’s publisher for nearly 30 years and I think I have seen this phenomenon only once before, in an omnibus volume of The History of Middle-earth more than 10 years ago. When we sent the printer your photos for an explanation, they asked us to retrieve the book and return it to them, so that they can be accurate in their post-mortem. Our aim is to reduce the odds of it happening ever again. The book has been sent off to them, but we have yet to get a reply, as it will take time to get there and for them to look at it.
  
  Twelve thousand copies of a 980-page book amounts to almost six million double-sided printed folios, produced in a largely automated factory with very little human intervention. While it is perhaps inevitable that in a mass-produced print run there might be a few faulty copies, no one should receive a faulty book, and there are statutory procedures to ensure that customers are entitled to a replacement or a refund. But ideally, of course, it should be right first time.
  
  We are not aware of any other copies of The History of The Hobbit being affected, as yours was.... It is now for HarperCollins to determine with our supplier the circumstances that led to an ink-stained book getting through their quality control procedures and ending up in circulation.
  
  Regarding your other question, the choice of paper on which we print our various different books is based on a variety of factors, including thickness, availability, price, environmental impact, the printer we use, and country in which the book is printed. Papers used years ago, and the paper mills that produced them, might not be available, and the paper market has become very competitive, with changing prices, long lead times and minimum order quantities sometimes dictating what we can use and when, and can result in a slightly different paper being used for a reprint when the original is no longer available. The intention for The History of the Hobbit, being essentially a new-cover reprint of the 2011 single volume (hence the number 4 impression number on the copyright page), was to match the paper of the previous impressions as closely as possible. The 2023 paper, unfortunately, turned out to be a few microns thicker than in 2011, as does happen, so the book has turned out to be a little fatter than before. We discussed chaging the paper to make the new impression thinner than before, but we were aware of complaints about the recent illustrated The Lord of the Rings, in which the thinner paper – which was essential in achieving a manageable spine width for that particular book – led to occasional creased and distorted pages in some copies, and was deemed by some readers to be a bit flimsy, so we were trying to avoid a repeat scenario. However, in light of comments we have seen online, I have asked our production team to revisit the paper question in the event of a reprint of The History of The Hobbit, in case there are viable options for making the book a little less cumbersome.
  
  We do take our customers’ feedback seriously, and you might also be interested to know that the forthcoming deluxe edition of The Hobbit will be printed and bound by a different company from The Silmarillion, as we strive to ensure the highest standards for our books. The Silmarillion had even larger print runs than The History of The Hobbit, but on that occasion more copies had to be replaced than I consider to be reasonable ... so we look forward to The Hobbit being a better experience for us all.

Really good news to read that they are taking notice. Thanks for the info.

I’m glad to hear that they’re trying to solve the quality issues by using a different manufacturer, but I wonder if by “a different company” they mean to just push Rotolito’s work over to their Chinese publisher that they’ve already been using? I’d be surprised if they actually went and got a new supplier entirely.

mntdewdskie wrote:

I’m glad to hear that they’re trying to solve the quality issues by using a different manufacturer, but I wonder if by “a different company” they mean to just push Rotolito’s work over to their Chinese publisher that they’ve already been using? I’d be surprised if they actually went and got a new supplier entirely.

I am not aware that they are currently using Chinese companies for printing, seem to have switched to UK and European printers.

Any updates on a deluxe edition coming out?

No updates on the details of it, but it is confirmed that a deluxe edition is coming out. It might even be release around the end of the year

That looks sharp. Hopefully the QC issues have been resolved.