They certainly seem to have gone up in price a lot, one was bought on Ebay for $238 in June.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 26183352#ebayphotohosting

The picture did not come out very well, very small. Do you have a larger picture?

It appears someone paid US $321.99 for the fake signature.

Have a look at this article on the Tolkien Library.

http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/fascimilesignatures.htm

This particular 'signature' has far to many problems even after the main issue which is that you should be very skeptical of any signature that has no provenance.

Here are a few, the dots under the signature are in the wrong place and the final dot after his name is missing. The dots are to signify abbreviation so Tolkien took care to put them in the right place i.e. after his initials (J.R.R.), this 'signature' has a dot after the T of Tolkien.

The flourish under the signature is not his usual style and if you look at it carefully it has gaps in it. Tolkien would have drawn it as one line (no gaps) and finally all the letters are wrong (the J is very bad, the i does not have a dot. There is no gap between the R and the T.

Andrew

This one is even more hilarious than yesterday's signature.

I love the quote "i have no idea who the portrait is of or whether it is genuine or original".

How many people in the world have not heard of J.R.R. Tolkien They do not know who the portrait is of, yet the Ebay listing is '"JRR Tolkien Pencil Portrait" Signed'. How did they come up with the listing title if they did not know who the portrait is of?

This must be in the top 10 of the worst forgeries I have ever seen, terrible!!! It is a very nice sketch that is ruined by a fake signature.

This was around for a long time, in my UK (listed as Sixth impression 1971) Hardback Hobbit if you look at the page Listing the Illustrations in the book (this is the only place it occurs and it is right at the start of the book), it is described as "Bilbo comes to the huts of the Ratelves".

The actual illustration is correct as Tolkien wrote the text on the picture. It is corrected in the UK 1978 edition, so was probably fixed in the middle of the seventies in the UK, may still have continued in US editions though.