28 October
(edited)Edited by Dird on 2024-10-28 7:57:46 PM UTC
2024-10-28 4:06:13 PM UTC
Recently found a great deal on a first edition Fellowship of the Ring, but when it arrived I noticed some issues with the dust jacket. While it looks reasonable at a glance, I noticed the inside rear flap has an uneven vertical cut and the text/image of Tolkien on the back cover and rear inside flap seem a little blurry/blown out.
The inside of the entire cover is also almost perfectly white, which I would not expect to see on a jacket that appears to have been handled quite a bit.
While the book itself seems real (possibly a 10th impression?), I'm looking for people's opinion on the legitimacy of the DJ specifically, but the book too if you have any information.
28 October
2024-10-28 5:38:47 PM UTC
First of all, welcome to the site!
Your copy of Fellowship looks to be a 9th printing, based on the title and copyright page images you've shared. Starting with the 10th printing HMCO started including a print history in FoTR.
It's really hard to know if your jacket is a facsimile or not, as we don't know much about the book's history. The color scheme is right for a 9th printing, and the absence of a price on the jacket flap is right as well. The image of Tolkien being cut straight across checks out too.
However there are two red flags I see here with this jacket, one is the paper itself used for the jacket appears a tad bit too glossy for what I have seen on these but it could be the lighting of your photos, hard to tell. Two is the uneven cut of the jacket flap, I never seen that on any of these volumes, and I have ten sets made up of various printings.
So, not a definitive answer, but that would be my observations.
28 October
2024-10-28 5:53:39 PM UTC
In addition to
Mr. Underhill's excellent observations, I have a lot of questions about that jacket, definitely. I don't think I have ever seen a jacket with that much physical wear, but on paper still that white/new. The book itself shows obvious sunning and wear, and that sunning and wear does not correlate at all with the damage to the jacket. It seems obvious to me that the jacket came from a different copy, and (possibly?) is a recent facsimile that was artificially damaged to try and make it look old. that huge hole in the jacket spine just below the "T" in Tolkien's name corresponds to the nicest, cleanest and most-blue portion of the book spine.
28 October
2024-10-28 6:55:51 PM UTC
100% fake in my opinion. The wear patterns are nothing like real wear patterns and the paper does not look to be brittle where the losses have occured, the white rear is inconsistent with a worn jacket and it looks to be inkjet printed. The damage is all just a distraction.
The ink will likely smudge under a damp cloth. A real jacket will definitely not smudge as the ink used in the offset printing would not have been water-based.
28 October
2024-10-28 7:19:05 PM UTC
The late Stu wrote:
100% fake in my opinion. The wear patterns are nothing like real wear patterns and the paper does not look to be brittle where the losses have occured, the white rear is inconsistent with a worn jacket and it looks to be inkjet printed. The damage is all just a distraction.
The ink will likely smudge under a damp cloth. A real jacket will definitely not smudge as the ink used in the offset printing would not have been water-based.
Agreed. The paper looks to have been ripped by hand, that separation of the layers does not happen through normal wear and tear.
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