Question re: 13th Impression of The Hobbit

Jimbo Baggins wrote:

Hi all - have visited this site often and have finally signed up now that I have a question to ask.

I've seen several copies of the 13th UK impression of The Hobbit (1961) for sale saying that they come with a dust jacket saying 14th impression. My first assumption is of course that people have simply put the dust jacket from a later copy onto them. However, as I have seen several examples of this I just wanted to confirm that my assumption is correct or whether there was any sort of printing error involved with this impression's dust jacket?

Thanks!

Wouldn't be a printing error, but using jackets from the prior print was not uncommon with Hobbits. Using jackets from a later print isn't something I'd necessarily expect, but it could be that they had more books bound than jackets available or some extra bound books from the earlier print came available when they were distributing the 14th. I don't think there are any records of jackets printed / books bound for this era. I doubt that there would be much incentive to put 1963 jackets onto 1961 copies though, so if you are seeing several like this, they most likely were issued like that. All my copies from 1959 onward have the correct jacket, but that's a sample size of one.

Anything more than one impression out of synch and I think you can safely say it is just a later jacket married up with an earlier book.

I am not a Hobbit impressions expert and would defer to other members who are, but I just thought to chime in to say that this is not unheard of with other Tolkien books. For example, there are Fourth Impressions of Farmer Giles with Fifth Impression dust jackets. See here: https://tolkienbooks.net/php/details2.php?id=266 "Some copies of the 4th Impression have been seen in 5th Impression dustwrappers."

Tuor son of Huor wrote:

I am not a Hobbit impressions expert and would defer to other members who are, but I just thought to chime in to say that this is not unheard of with other Tolkien books. For example, there are Fourth Impressions of Farmer Giles with Fifth Impression dust jackets. See here: https://tolkienbooks.net/php/details2.php?id=266 "Some copies of the 4th Impression have been seen in 5th Impression dustwrappers."

Also, I have a 3-vol HB second edition set of LOTR, where the impressions date from 1984 and 1985, but with Unwin Hyman DJs which were first published in 1987. From a discussion in the Tolkien collectors FB group, it looked like mine wasn't the only example.

Predictable Matt wrote:

Tuor son of Huor wrote:

I am not a Hobbit impressions expert and would defer to other members who are, but I just thought to chime in to say that this is not unheard of with other Tolkien books. For example, there are Fourth Impressions of Farmer Giles with Fifth Impression dust jackets. See here: https://tolkienbooks.net/php/details2.php?id=266 "Some copies of the 4th Impression have been seen in 5th Impression dustwrappers."

Also, I have a 3-vol HB second edition set of LOTR, where the impressions date from 1984 and 1985, but with Unwin Hyman DJs which were first published in 1987. From a discussion in the Tolkien collectors FB group, it looked like mine wasn't the only example.

It isn't uncommon to see A&U impressions mixed with UH impressions in the first UH DJ. I have a set like that (which came boxed), where the FoTR is the earlier impression with a red topstain and the other two books are UH with no topstain. I've seen other examples.

I haven't personally seen later jackets of 60s Hobbits used on earlier copies (and I've seen a lot of Hobbits in my time), but if the OP has seen more than one or two, they probably just started out that way -- especially as anecdotally, the 1963 almost certainly has less extant copies than the 1961 impressions which are very common in comparison (very common outright, in fact). One wouldn't expect extra jackets to be floating around on the used market waiting to be repurposed.

My 13th is in a 14th jacket adding to the statistics.

wheresrob wrote:

My 13th is in a 14th jacket adding to the statistics.

Yep, as soon as you have multiple exemplars, it seems incredibly unlikely that they didn't start out that way from A&U.