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dreamflowerContinuing my quotes *about* JRRT and LotR:
Today’s quotes are a “blast from the past”. Both of them date back to 1969, when The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were undergoing their *first* wave of immense popularity. The books had recently been released in paperback, and there was a good deal of publicity due to the unauthorized publications by Ace Books.
But Tolkien’s books in the authorized edition soon became extremely popular, and references to his world became mainstream years before the waves of popularity due to the movies.
I was still a junior in high school when I bought the following two books. I still own the original paperbacks, though sadly one of them recently shed the back cover, and the pages are yellowed.
The first quote is from Peter S. Beagle’s (yes, the author of The Last Unicorn) Foreword to the Ballantine Books edition of The Tolkien Reader.
“The Lord of the Rings and its prologueThe Hobbit belong, in my experience to a small group of books and poems and songs that I have truly shared with other people. The strangest strangers turn out to know it, and we talk about Gandalf and Gollum and the Bridge of Khazad-dûm while the party or the classroom or the train rattles along unheard. Old friends rediscover it, as I do--to browse through any book of the Ring trilogy is to get hooked once more into the whole legend--and we talk of it at once as though we had just read it for the first time, and as though we were remembering something that had happened to us together long ago. Something of ourselves has gone into reading it, and so it belongs to us.”
The second quote is from the first book I ever bought that was *about* Tolkien: Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter.
(Lin Carter, by the way, was an editor at Ballantine Books, and came to head up their entire line of Fantasy, bringing out for the first time such fantasies as Joy Chant’s Red Moon, Black Mountain and Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels and reprints by such authors as Lord Dunsany, William Morris and James Branch Cabell.)
I selected the quote partly from the irony of it, and wonder what Mr. Carter would have thought if he could have lived to see the phenomenal success of the films--I think he would have been tickled, but not surprised. At any rate, anyone who was reading Tolkien back then will find themselves smiling nostalgically at the following facts and figures:
“For a work of modern fiction seriously compared to Ariosto, Malory, and Spenser, The Lord of the Rings has proved an astonishingly popular commercial success. Sales of the hardcover edition moved slowly but steadily in the country for about nine years. It was not until the trilogy began appearing in paperback editions--the first from Ace Books in June 1965 and four months later Tolkien’s own revision from Ballantine--that Tolkien began to make publishing history. For a 1,300 page trilogy to sell a quarter of a million copies in ten months is certainly extraordinary. As the author of eighteen moderately popular fantasy or science fiction books myself, I can assure you that to sell over 250,000 copies of a paperback set costing from $2.25 (Ace) to $2.85 (Ballantine) is an utterly astonishing fact.”
(By the way, I paid $1.50 for my Tolkien Reader and .95 for the Carter book, and yes, my paperback set of the trilogy featuring the famous psychedelic covers cost less than $3.00 in 1967. Books made a sizable dent in my $5.00 a week allowance that was also supposed to include my school lunches and notebook paper, pencils, etc.)
Today’s quotes are a “blast from the past”. Both of them date back to 1969, when The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were undergoing their *first* wave of immense popularity. The books had recently been released in paperback, and there was a good deal of publicity due to the unauthorized publications by Ace Books.
But Tolkien’s books in the authorized edition soon became extremely popular, and references to his world became mainstream years before the waves of popularity due to the movies.
I was still a junior in high school when I bought the following two books. I still own the original paperbacks, though sadly one of them recently shed the back cover, and the pages are yellowed.
The first quote is from Peter S. Beagle’s (yes, the author of The Last Unicorn) Foreword to the Ballantine Books edition of The Tolkien Reader.
“The Lord of the Rings and its prologueThe Hobbit belong, in my experience to a small group of books and poems and songs that I have truly shared with other people. The strangest strangers turn out to know it, and we talk about Gandalf and Gollum and the Bridge of Khazad-dûm while the party or the classroom or the train rattles along unheard. Old friends rediscover it, as I do--to browse through any book of the Ring trilogy is to get hooked once more into the whole legend--and we talk of it at once as though we had just read it for the first time, and as though we were remembering something that had happened to us together long ago. Something of ourselves has gone into reading it, and so it belongs to us.”
The second quote is from the first book I ever bought that was *about* Tolkien: Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter.
(Lin Carter, by the way, was an editor at Ballantine Books, and came to head up their entire line of Fantasy, bringing out for the first time such fantasies as Joy Chant’s Red Moon, Black Mountain and Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels and reprints by such authors as Lord Dunsany, William Morris and James Branch Cabell.)
I selected the quote partly from the irony of it, and wonder what Mr. Carter would have thought if he could have lived to see the phenomenal success of the films--I think he would have been tickled, but not surprised. At any rate, anyone who was reading Tolkien back then will find themselves smiling nostalgically at the following facts and figures:
“For a work of modern fiction seriously compared to Ariosto, Malory, and Spenser, The Lord of the Rings has proved an astonishingly popular commercial success. Sales of the hardcover edition moved slowly but steadily in the country for about nine years. It was not until the trilogy began appearing in paperback editions--the first from Ace Books in June 1965 and four months later Tolkien’s own revision from Ballantine--that Tolkien began to make publishing history. For a 1,300 page trilogy to sell a quarter of a million copies in ten months is certainly extraordinary. As the author of eighteen moderately popular fantasy or science fiction books myself, I can assure you that to sell over 250,000 copies of a paperback set costing from $2.25 (Ace) to $2.85 (Ballantine) is an utterly astonishing fact.”
(By the way, I paid $1.50 for my Tolkien Reader and .95 for the Carter book, and yes, my paperback set of the trilogy featuring the famous psychedelic covers cost less than $3.00 in 1967. Books made a sizable dent in my $5.00 a week allowance that was also supposed to include my school lunches and notebook paper, pencils, etc.)
