Deagol, I don't mean to come down hard on HC's books. You are right. They have published some nice books, and I do thoroughly enjoy them. My only beef with them is regarding their communication skills. They could really stand to tune up their marketing and customer service groups. Their marketing team tends to send out misleading emails and publish misleading photos of books. More importantly, though, I had problems with an order from them once (took over 2 months for delivery from purchase date) and I emailed them three times trying to figure out the status of the order. I never, to this day, have received a reply to those emails. I finally called customer service and left a message, also with no reply. Fortunately, the books were delivered a couple days after that, but I still never heard from them at all. In fact, the only time customer service ever returned one of my emails was when I wrote to compliment them for producing nice books! They replied with a 'thank you for the compliments' email, that was actually quite cordial. So now, my impression is that they do okay with meaningless chit-chat, but can't figure out how to deal with issues. I know they are not necessarily bad people or bad publishers, but at least you can see why I might get frustrated with them.

In response to Khamul,

If anything is odd, no receipt for a £250 purchase is.

I hve to give HC a bit of slack here: most if not all retailers, even those with efficient web fulfillment processes, will not send an email receipt for a phone order. At least in my experience. A paper receipt mailed with the book(s) or in a separate envelope is pretty much industry standard, at least in the States. Certainly, credit card companies do not expect you to have a paper receipt when you dispute a phone order (from personal experience).

I also have to show HC some love, but will be in line with the rest of you wishing that they got their act together as a retailer - I am not aware of any major publishers that run a smooth retail operation, really... most don't even try.

Rowns wrote:

I am not aware of any major publishers that run a smooth retail operation, really... most don't even try.

That's an excellent point, Rowns. I think we all get used to the type of service we receive from retail specialists, like Amazon, and then just assume everyone should be running things the same way. I am guessing that HC does not dedicate many personel to the retail branch of the business, not to mention that HC is not exclusively a J.R.R. Tolkien publishing company. I suppose we should be happy that they focus on Tolkien as much as they do, and since nearly all of their books can be obtained through Amazon, it is only the exclusive editions that are in question.

My beef with HC all along is that they are not a retailer, but they are playing half-assedly at being one. I don't actually think we should cut them too much slack because they have *chosen* to operate outside of their normal space, without being properly prepared to do so. It's important not to confuse whether they produce good books (as they evidently do) or whether they are good at retail. The two issues have been confused on this thread, but they are totally unrelated.

Retail operations are just completely different than wholesale, which is why the retailer gets to charge an extra 30-50% for their trouble (and still might only just manage to turn a profit).

All that said, if HC can get to the point where they consistently manage to send my parcels to the correct (and complete) delivery address, adequately packaged, then that's *all* I really care about. If they can manage to fix that, I'm cool with them.

Stu

My copy arrived today! Safe and sound and nicely packaged. Number 30. A very nice looking book. There are a few small differences when compared to CoH, but nothing of any great significance.

Deagol, glad to hear it's a nice looking book and it sounds like you are pleased with it. Would be very interested in seeing a photo if you get a chance (but understand real life can get in the way of such things!).

Stu

Deagol, can you speak to the color of the book? Is it very close to the picture released by HC, or is it like the Super Deluxe CoH, where the photo made the clamshell look black when it was actually blue? I am hoping for it to be close to the color in the photo, which seems to resemble the color of the 1998 Signed Deluxe Silmarillion.

Also, did you say you ordered on 20-May, at around 10:00AM? I was about 16 hours after that, so I am guessing that I should be somewhere in the 50 to 70 range(?), seeing as how you got #30.

I have only seen one small pic of the clamshell. In hand it looks a little lighter - chestnut brown I would say. Like CoH the clamshell is a heavier duty leather of a different colour to the book - but the colour difference is more marked with this new deluxe edition. The book itself it bound in a mid-brown leather which is very soft, so we will have to handle this book carefully!
The clamshell has a lift up shelf on a ribbon to make extracting the book a little easier, but I am unwilling to tug on it just in case it isn't 100% solid... Unlike CoH, the page corners have been rounded off to approximate the round corners of the binding.

Links to a few quick snaps below. Apologies for the quality. The colours are lightened a little by the flash.

LSG1

LSG2

LSG3

Thanks for the pictures. I'm really glad they retained the curved corners on the boards (as I thought they might save money by going with normal corners), although I'm not sure about the idea of having the curve on the page block itself - I assume it looks better than it sounds (Seems like an odd and pointless deviation from the CoH SD, mind).

On the durability side, I guess the softness of the leather isn't too important as these books will typically live in their traycases anyway. Sounds a bit concerning that you don't want to pull the lift-out ribbon because you are worried it might come off. Is that just good old-fashioned paranoia, or do you have cause to think it might not be strongly constructed?

I think that you got number 30 (despite being pretty quick off the mark) definitely means they sold some the day before or had some pre-paid orders that got the earlier numbers.

Stu

Here are some more pictures of the SuperDeluxe COH and Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun for comparison.

http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/3327/img0046jlf.jpg

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4302/img0047f.jpg

http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/2372/img0048n.jpg

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/5265/img0045m.jpg

There are differences between the two books in book size and clamshell size, but they do look nice together. The lift out ribbon as you can see in the pictures is attached differently to COH, and I can't see how this new design is meant to work.

I ordered at about 12pm and my copy is number 73. I was also impressed with the huge box that it came in which was very well packed.