Pitch - it is a classic... surely?
I don't have a problem about it being in different sections and for the bookseller that is certainly a good plan - it isn't so long that it was very high up in a list of books that they are always able to sell. And if you are only going to have it in one of the younger sections from a marketing point of view it is better to flatter the younger children than insult the older ones. Nevertheless I did go 9-12 and Children's classics before a last chance look in teens.
I just thought that teenagers might find it too young in tone and remembered ten year old Rayner Unwin's initial review estimating it would appeal to children of 5 to 9. Maybe it is that teenagers have been discovering the Hobbit via the Lord of the Rings (via the films?) rather than discovering LOTR via the Hobbit. I do remmeber being upset by the ponies being eaten (maybe why there are so few equine casualties in LOTR) and crying at the deaths of Thorin and Fili and Kili but in a moved rather than traumatised way.
I am probably reading to much into this but it is certain that childhood has changed both from when the Hobbit was first published, to when I first read it over forty years later and in the years since. The book hasn't changed so maybe our perceptions and ideas of what is suitable has. Certainly modern children are more sophisticated than their forties equivalents but many of the forties children would have left school at 14 and so had to grow up in that respect much quicker.
I do wonder about new generations reading the Harry Potter books .. the first is very much a children's book and the later ones are not - several times the length and much darker... I might go back and see where the bookshop has put them and if they have split the series.
