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Originally Posted by Lalwendë
at this time he'd had to remove his enormous library from Merton College after retirement and he struggled to find storage for it, which is why he converted the garage, but all the same large numbers of his books had to be given up.
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Now there might be something fascinating. A catalogue of all of Tolkien's books, first of all. And then, slogging through sales records and old book stores, tracking them down--or as many as can be found.
People always leave old notes, scribbles in books. Maybe mostly junk, but it might be interesting to see if by accident anything interesting was squirreled away in his books.
The other matter might be to see if he had the habbit of writing comments and notes in the margins. It's often regarded as a terrible habbit, but perhaps he, like Coleridge, succumbed to it. Lamb once loaned his folio edition of Shakespeare to Coleridge, with the strick stipulation that he not mark it up. I gather it came back full of marginalia and jam splotches. Worth twice the amount now, for Coleridge's asides.
Now that might be worth a trip to Oxford and treks around all the used book stores, although I'm sure that the entrepreneurial book buyers would already have sniffed out the old stores.