For what it's worth, Christina and I have checked our two first printings of Sauron Defeated (one is a book club edition), and both have 'be'; and the first paperback printing, from the following year, which has 'me'.

BTW, would one actually find this kind of very detailed information in the Hammond/Anderson Bibliography, I mean do they really record every single misprint or other error of any kind that was ever noted and subsequently corrected (or not, as may be)?? For example, would it answer this specific question?

I would have included the be/me point had I known about it, and will do so in the second edition of the Bibliography. I made it a policy to record all errors and corrections as far as I knew about them, for the sake of identifying copies and as a guide to the most accurate texts. Sauron Defeated was published in January 1992, however, the cutoff date for submitting my manuscript was summer of that year, and I was much occupied that spring with tracing changes to The Lord of the Rings and with preparing for the Tolkien Centenary Conference, so I didn't have time to examine Sauron Defeated in great detail. It's the last entry (A29a) in the first section of the Bibliography, except for a placeholder for the Houghton Mifflin edition (A29b), which wasn't published until October 1992.

Wayne

Checked my 2nd Printing

It is "be".

Thanks remy, you've sated my curiosity! :) So this was only corrected in the first paperback edition, after all.

Wayne and Christina: Thanks for answering my other question(s) in your post!
Sounds like I need to start shopping for the Descriptive Bibliography in earnest. But I'll probably wait for the second edition...quite a few things have been published since 1992, after all...
Guess it's still "premature to predict a date of publication" (quoting from your website)? Now I'm being hasty again...

Cheers,

felagund