Hundreds of Tolkien books on sale in Oxfam St Giles bookshop

At Oxfam’s Oxford St Giles bookshop, Tolkien books - from The Silmarillion to The Return of the King - have taken over the shop windows in a beautiful display. We’ve teamed up with HarperCollins Publishers to run a two-week Tolkien event (9th-23rd October) to celebrate the city’s passion for JRR Tolkien’s books and the strong links which the author had with his home city — and to thank the Tolkien Trust for the generous support they have given to Oxfam’s work.

The Tolkien Trust, established by JRR Tolkien’s four children, has generously supported Oxfam’s work for many years - especially Oxfam’s East Africa Food Crisis response last December. We wanted to celebrate this generosity. When HarperCollins donated a selection of Tolkien books with a retail value in excess of £10,000, we decided the best way to say thank you was to sell them in our shop just down the road from The Eagle and Child. This was of course Tolkien’s favourite pub in Oxford, where he used to meet his friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, among others, in a weekly meeting on Thursday evenings called ‘The Inklings‘. It was in these meetings that Tolkien would read aloud parts of The Lord of the Rings, while it was still a work-in-progress, for constructive criticism from his fellow writers - so it seems fitting that the trilogy is coming home to this block.

All the books will be on sale to the public, and proceeds will be used to fund Oxfam’s lifesaving work around the world.