TOLKIEN, J.R.R. The Hobbit or There and Back Again, Illustrated by the Author. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1972.
8vo. Original green cloth-textured paper over boards, title in dark blue to front panel between wraparound decorations by the author (also dark blue). Illustrated map endpapers: Thor's Map to front, Wilderland to rear; dustwrapper with wraparound illustration by Tolkien, in black, green and blue, of the Lonely Mountain and neighbouring mountains and forest, runic inscription to upper and lower edges; pp. 317, [3], 4 coloured plates, black and white illustrations throughout; lightly rubbed to upper outer corner of wrapper, a fine, bright copy, pages and wrapper crisp and clean.
A beautiful copy of the seventh UK issue of the Third Edition (incorporating the author's final revisions) of Tolkien’s great adventure of Middle-earth.
In a letter to W. H. Auden dated 7 June 1955, Tolkien claimed that all he remembered about the genesis of The Hobbit was “sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’. I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further […]”. He was Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford (where Auden had been one of his students). A typescript (lacking only the final chapters) was ready in time for it to be shown to C. S. Lewis in winter 1932-3” (Lewis mentions the “children's story which Tolkien has just written” in a letter of 4 February 1933), but the work remained unpublished until 1937, when it was issued in the famous jacket designed by the author. The story, which follows Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit, who joins the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves on a quest to reclaim stolen treasure was an instant success.
Although a Second Edition was published in 1951, for which Tolkien took the opportunity to correct “several minor inaccuracies”, the revisions made for this Third Edition in 1965 were more extensive and the final authorial changes made to the book. This edition, Constance B. Hieatt states, “is the crucial one […] which most readers today have actually read, in one impression or another, and which represents the final version of The Hobbit in all but the most minor details.”
The revisions made to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings during the 1960s were prompted by the author’s wish to harmonise the two works more completely. Tolkien was also urged by his US publisher to produce new editions, so that copyright could be freshly applied and his royalties secured (the United States at the time not part of the international copyright convention). The new Hobbit first appeared in a Ballantine US paperback edition in February 1966, followed the same year in the UK by an Unwin paperback, Longmans School edition, and this new Allen & Unwin hardback edition with the author's original designs intact.
See Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977); Constance B. Hieatt, The Text of The Hobbit: Putting Tolkien’s Notes in Order, English Studies in Canada, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 1981, pp. 212-224.
Cf. Hammond A3i.
SKU: 2125470