Fantastic Trotter!

Yes, this is wonderful. You must be one of the fews on this good Earth to own all the 4 signed editions by Christopher of CoH! Congrats
But there's still the question if some of the Houghton Mifflin Deluxe editions has been signed bookplates pasted in or not... Guess we'll never know.

Emilien wrote:

But there's still the question if some of the Houghton Mifflin Deluxe editions has been signed bookplates pasted in or not... Guess we'll never know.

I think they probably do exist, but I have never seen one.

Trotter wrote:

Emilien wrote:

But there's still the question if some of the Houghton Mifflin Deluxe editions has been signed bookplates pasted in or not... Guess we'll never know.

I think they probably do exist, but I have never seen one.

There are some loose signed bookplates in existence. Below is a Photo of one from the Launch in San Francisco at "Booksmith" (who had 5 Bookplates). They were not inserted into the book. So in theory any loose bookplate can be inserted into a HMCO Deluxe (if one wished to do so).

See here also:
https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/n ... php?topic_id=288&start=11

I just received my First Edition of LR, won for 600 £ on ebay :
- FR Fifth impression from December 1956
- TT Fourth impression 1956
- RK Second impression 1955.

I'm really happy, because with the Royal Mail, they have a delay of one month and I feared they were lost for good ! Do you think I paid the fair price ?

Druss wrote:

I just received my First Edition of LR, won for 600 £ on ebay :
- FR Fifth impression from December 1956
- TT Fourth impression 1956
- RK Second impression 1955.

I'm really happy, because with the Royal Mail, they have a delay of one month and I feared they were lost for good ! Do you think I paid the fair price ?

I'd say that if you're happy with them Druss, then you paid a fair price

Just completed my UK HoME all first/first VG or Fine unclipped unfaded collection with a VG+ Lays of Beleriand - I paid top price but I can probably offset by selling some first later impressions. Decent first first's seemed to be getting less common and I got fed up waiting and imported this from the US

Predictable Matt wrote:

I've recently gathered some copies of publications with contemporary reviews of LOTR:

- W.H. Auden reviewing ROTK for the New York Times Book Review - lovely full page spread with the cover art for the HMCO dust jacket.

- W.H. Auden reviewing FOTR for Encounter magazine (a copy of the New York Times Book Review with his review is also on its way to me).

- Naomi Mitchison reviewing FOTR for The New Statesman and Nation (see Letters #154 and #155).

- The novelist Howard Spring reviewing FOTR in Country Life Magazine.

- H.A. Blair reviewing TT and ROTK for Theology (it seems Blair was an acquaintance of C.S. Lewis).

For those (like me!) who might find this a fun fact - in the FOTR review in Encounter, W.H. Auden says "so exact is [Tolkien] that a reader who consults the beautiful map at the end of the book will observe immediately that the course of the road between Hoarwell Bridge and Bruinen Ford is erroneously drawn" - which was the very point covered, in quite some detail, some 30 years later in The Return of the Shadow (p.199 et seq. in the 2015 HC paperback).

He also hopes that "in the second edition, [the publishers] will place the topographical map in a pocket instead of gumming it to the inside cover, for most readers are going to do what I did, tear it out in order to follow the text".

So if you have a 1st/1st FOTR with the map still attached, it probably wasn't Auden's copy

Predictable Matt wrote:

He also hopes that "in the second edition, [the publishers] will place the topographical map in a pocket instead of gumming it to the inside cover, for most readers are going to do what I did, tear it out in order to follow the text".

So if you have a 1st/1st FOTR with the map still attached, it probably wasn't Auden's copy

I think he missed the point of the map, you can read the book with the map open, it is designed that way ?

The early impressions had the maps positioned to fold downward. This made it really hard to refer to the map while reading as it folded out in between the reader and the book rather than above the book!