Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

I drafted this back in the Fall, when The Hobbit was first hitting the theaters but neglected to post it. So belatedly, the Book of the Week is The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, the second in the legendary Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is the 1965 Ace Books "pirated" edition, the first American paperback, with cover art by Jack Gaughan.

I previously covered the story of Ace's unauthorized edition of Lord of the Rings, and you certainly don't need me to tell you who this fellow Tolkien was. So let's use this space to discuss another aspect of the Lord of the Rings intellectual property rights, unrelated to the dispute with Ace Books. I confess I've never watched the animated Lord of the Rings films, so I was not aware of this oddity until researching the Ace editions for this blog.

It seems that when Ralph Bakshi was creating the 1978 animated version, the studio persuaded him to adapt the three books into two films. (That's not as odd as it sounds, since Tolkien himself never conceived of the story as a trilogy.) So for the first film, confusingly released (over Bakshi's objection) under the title The Lord of the Rings, the studio only acquired the film rights to The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. That left the door open, when Bakshi ended up not making the second film, for Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. (who did the previous animated version of The Hobbit) to make the 1980 animated edition of The Return of the King. The trouble is, they only had rights to the third book, so most of what occurs in the second half of The Two Towers, including the defeat of Saruman and what happens in Shelob's lair, is omitted from any of the animated films. Thankfully, Peter Jackson came along and made the whole issue moot.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Following up on last week's Hobbit post, the Book of the Week is the first American paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, with cover art by Jack Gaughan. This is the infamous "pirated" edition, released by Ace Books in May 1965.

Ace initially did not pay Tolkien or his British publisher for the rights to Lord of the Rings, believing the books had unwittingly fallen into the public domain in the United States, due to the excessive number of copies imported here from Britain. (The validity of Ace's position apparently turned on whether one considers a book bound in the U.S. containing pages printed in the U.K. to be an imported edition.) Thus, the Book of the Week contains no copyright notice at all.

Ballantine subsequently published the authorized (and revised, so as to resurrect the copyright) paperback editions and launched a public relations campaign against Ace, with Tolkien actually comparing Ace Books to his villain Sauron. Ace relented and agreed to pay Tolkien for its edition and not to print further copies, thus assuring that the Ace editions would become the copies coveted by subsequent collectors.

Next week: the Ace edition of The Two Towers.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Book of the Week is The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I used to do "Book of the Week" posts highlighting some of the volumes from my personal book collection, in which I take absurd pride. I ran out of gas (but I sure as hell didn't run out of books) about three years ago——click on the "Book of the Week" tag if you want to sample some of the old posts——but I felt compelled to resurrect the Book of the Week today, when I read that this is the 75th anniversary of the original release of The Hobbit.

As any regular reader of this blog (and pretty much everyone else) already knows, The Hobbit is one of the most beloved classics of modern fantasy, and its author J.R.R. Tolkien arguably the most important fantasist of the Twentieth Century. Sadly, I wasn't around in 1937 to pick up the first edition of The Hobbit, which now runs to tens of thousands of dollars on the collectors' market. But I'm pleased at least to have the first American paperback, published by Ballantine Books in 1965, cover art by Barbara Remington.

Note that this cover has very little to do with the story of The Hobbit——you will search the text in vain for any mention of the ostrich creatures or the goofy-looking lion that appear on the front of the book. Tolkien particularly disliked the lion, and at his request it was airbrushed out of later printings. Artist Barbara Remington had not yet read The Hobbit when she did the cover. This is not quite so irresponsible as it sounds; Ace Books had recently beaten Ballantine to the American market with unauthorized paperback editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Ballantine rushed The Hobbit to press so as to forestall another pirated Ace edition.

For the next Book of the Week entry, I'll show you the unauthorized Ace edition of The Fellowship of the Ring.