Favourite Edition?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

A barrel, Lalwendë? Surely nothing short of the Armada's displacement in fortified wine and a decade of angelic behaviour will do. Looks as though I'm out of the running, but I might pick up that sherry anyway.

Normally when it comes to books I don't mind which edition I'm reading, although like a number of other members, I prefer to get my books from strange little second-hand shops. There used to be one in Colchester a while ago, which my friends there called 'The Fairy Regio' (a reference to the Ars Magica RPG system), and which we assumed only appeared at certain times. Perhaps that's where they go, just as Terry Pratchett suggested.

Completely by accident I managed to pick up an early Silmarillion from 1977 (not the genuine first edition, but a virtual facsimile of it) by pursuing exactly this second-hand-only policy. It has a large fold-out map of Beleriand, which is a lot easier to read than the version printed in most editions, and since it's neither a particularly rare nor particularly valuable edition, I'm safe to use it for everyday reading.

My other Tolkien treasures were the result of a temporarily large surplus income (largely the product of poor diet and inexpensive hobbies). The first of these was a first edition of Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, which a friend of mine sold to me because he had the pictures elsewhere. It has that air of opulent naffness exuded by so many things from the 1970s (the opulence was lost somewhere around 1982, never to return), and has an enormous picture inside the flyleaf of the man himself, predictably smoking a pipe in front of a shelf of books and wearing a tweed jacket. The second of these treasured volumes is my favourite edition.

The most beloved Tolkien book in a library of second-hand, out-of-print, odd, rare, foreign-language and sometimes terrible volumes, is my first edition set of LotR. I have three late impressions, all roughly contemporary and dating from the early 1960s, which I picked up from Oxfam in Colchester a couple of years ago. A story about my purchase appeared in a local newspaper, which interviewed and photographed me for the purpose; clearly they were short of stories in Essex that month.

Anyway, how shall I laud the first edition to the stars? Firstly, it has the best dust jacket anyone has ever used for an LotR edition. Forget hiking Gandalfs, psychedelic trees and film screen-shots: in 1954 they were iconic, simple and demographically non-specific, not to mention leaving the entire story to the imagination. They also bound the volumes in red cloth, which was a nice touch. Then there were the fold-out maps (seldom if ever reproduced since), which are in red and black on white. The map in the back of The Return of the King deserves particular mention, since it has 'Kirith Ungol' in place of the more usual spelling. I think that HoME has the gen on this development.

Other than that, the first edition is the one JRRT and CJRT use in their page references, which saves a lot of hunting around for quotations, and it has a different and friendlier author's forward, which I posted a while ago here.

Of course, most of the time I use my HarperCollins all-in-one hardback. No sense wearing out the Sunday best in daily use.