My US 1938 First Edition Hobbit Collection

I thought I would finally post a couple pictures, just for you all, of my collection of US 1938 First Edition Hobbits.

I bought my first copy in May of 1978 for $80...which was a lot of money for a kid just starting college. 43 years and 43 purchases later, I now have 44 US 1938 Firsts...including a number of library copies, rebinds, and four with original dust jackets.

Most of my books I covered with facsimile jackets (except of course those with original jackets or unique rebinds) and all I had slipcases or clamshells made for storage.

I used the US Hobbit Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English- ... First_edition_identifier) as opposed to Wayne Hammond’s 1993 Tolkien Bibliography as a guide to help determine which of the states (variants/printings) was each copy (I very briefly discussed with Wayne Hammond, at the Morgan Library in 2019, the six proposed states in the article...he did suggest that there could indeed be more states than the two that were described in his 1993 Bibliography).

[A note, I am not sure I have a good representative subset of books to make any factual observations on these states other than perhaps state 2 seems to be one of hardest to find. But I would like to one day use my collection to update the wiki article if needed.]

Anyway, here is some data on my collection:

State -Count

1 -13
(1 library binding)
(2 ex library marked)
(2 with jackets)
(1 5 loose pages)
(1 loose Eagle page)

2 -1

3 -19
(2 with jackets)
(2 library bindings)
(1 rebinding)
(1 loose page)
(1 loose boards/Eagle page)
(1 rebinding/Hobbiton missing)

4a -1
(1 library binding)

4b -7
(1 library binding)

4c -3

Total: 44

Anyway, I thought I would share...

Lance