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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli
To take the two postings in order: HarperCollins is 'the' Tolkien publisher simply because they bought out Allen & Unwin (or rather Unwin Hyman) in 1990. There's no reason for CT to change horses, esp. since HarperCollins was willing to continue publishing the later volumes of The History of Middle-earth on what was effectively a break-even basis. That doesn't however mean that the Estate has a great deal of control: if you look at the various film spin-off books' copyright pages you'll see a notice to the effect of "Published with permission but not approval of the Tolkien Estate."
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True, but CT could have chosen pretty much any publisher for CoH that he wanted (though one suspects that the uproar resulting from choosing any other publisher would have caused major issues re the other works) and certainly HC have produced some very nice editions of Tolkien's works - the recent HB editions of LotR, The Sil, UT & the forthcoming Hobbit are much higher quality than preceeding ones.
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As to Alan Lee: AL has of course been the Estate's first choice illustrator since long before the movies ever darkened the horizon, and AL's participation in the project wasn't going to earn him a blackball! I suspect this was the subtext of CT's press release, where he disclaimed 'thinking ill' of those involved with the films.
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This is one reason why I tend to take Simon Tolkien's statement that his approval of the films is the reason for the estrangement between himself & his father - the idea that CT would cut himself off from his son merely for liking the movies, while still working happily with Alan Lee (& John Howe) who worked on the movies doesn;t hold up. And again, the one painting we've seen so far could have been a pre-production still from the LotR movies, so either AL was just rubbing CT's nose in the fact that he contributed so much to the look of the films & CT just had to accept it, or CT has no real problem with the movies. I think the fact that AL is the artist of choice of CT & the Estate really puts paid to any rumours of 'anger' or unhappiness on their part re the movies. My own feeling is that CT is no more 'unhappy' with the movies than many lovers of the book who may have appreciated PJ's effort but did not admire the movies very much.