TOLKIEN, J.R.R. The Hobbit or There and Back Again, Illustrated by the Author. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1966.
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. 320, 4 coloured plates (including frontispiece), black and white illustrations throughout; boards lightly bumped to three outer corners, minor pushing and fading to lower spine tip, a touch of rubbing to upper spine tip; an exceptional copy, fine and bright, pages and wrapper crisp and clean.
A beautiful copy of the uncommon first 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mentions the “children's story which Tolkien has just written” in a letter of 4 February 1933), but the work remained unpublished until 1937, when it was issued in the famous jacket designed by the author.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.
If things weren't complicated enough, Hammond's bibliography (itself a labyrinth worthy of Tolkien himself) notes that the publisher described the Allen & Unwin Third edition erroneously on the copyright page. As with the Second Edition (1951), also described as the Fifth impression, the intention was that impression numbering should continue across Second and Third Editions. As Hammond explains, however, “the [impression] numbering of A3i [this 1966 Sixteenth Impression] [.] suggests that the ‘fifteenth’ was the first impression of the new edition. The true ‘fifteenth’ impression of the […] hardcover Hobbit, however, published in 1965, was the final impression [the eleventh] of the second edition (A3c).” What should have appeared on the copyright page as: “Third Edition, Sixteenth Impression” (following the Fifteenth Impression, 1965) was mistakenly described as the “Sixteenth Impression, 1966” (following Third Edition, Fifteenth Impression, 1966). Published 30 June 1966, the Sixteenth Impression (as presented here) is the true (only) first issue of the Allen & Unwin Third Edition of The Hobbit. The number of copies printed was not recorded.
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.
Hammond A3i.
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