Pardagast, thanks very much for bringing the Monash Review article to light. We'll add it to our bibliographical notes and Companion and Guide addenda.

Morgan, the fanzine A Elbereth Gilthoniel! does have an exclamation mark in its title. We can confirm this from the issues in our collection (in photocopy). The vertical line to the right of the title words on the cover is meant to be an exclamation mark, and is more detailed than the reproduction makes clear. The Marquette cataloging is derived from information supplied by Gary Hunnewell, the leading expert in Tolkien fanzines; we have Gary's information in our reference files as well.

Wayne & Christina

We've heard from West Virginia University Press that this year's Tolkien Studies (Vol. IX, 2012) "will not be ready until August or September for mailing".

Wayne & Christina

Christopher Tolkien's preface in the "pocket edition" is a reprint of the text published in 2007, with a small change in pagination and the reproduction of Mirkwood. The 2007 text was revised and shortened, omitting the facsimile manuscript pages and the rest of the art printed earlier; presumably this was done because John Rateliff's History of The Hobbit was published that same year and included transcription from the earliest surviving manuscript as well as some comment on illustrations (for which one also could refer to our J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator).

Christopher's foreword (as it was first called) dates from the 50th anniversary Hobbit of 1987. It was revised and expanded in the deluxe edition of 2004, in which the manuscript facsimiles were printed in colour (they're in black and white in the 1987 edition). We reproduced Tolkien's illustrations in The Art of The Hobbit, but of the two pages of manuscript only the one with art on it (the early sketch of Thror's Map). John Rateliff also reproduced only the first of the two pages in his History.

A fuller comparison may be found in a new post on our blog.

The printing and binding of the "Pocket Hobbit" are perfectly good for an ordinary trade book, though of course the type (reduced from the standard edition) is somewhat small. Anyway, it doesn't include the full text of Christopher's foreword or the manuscript facsimiles.

Wayne & Christina

A typed letter signed by Tolkien, 12 January 1966, to David Hicks, London, is being offered for sale by University Archives for $3,900. 1 p., emboss-stamped as from 76 Sandfield Road, Oxford. The letter is reproduced on the dealer's website.

Wayne & Christina

Roots and Branches is well worth having. Shippey refers to the letter in his paper 'Tolkien and the West Midlands: The Roots of Romance'. There he doesn't give a date for it, other than to say that Tolkien wrote to him after Shippey had addressed a Tolkien conference in Birmingham 'in 1970' - except that the event occurred on 30 November 1969. The paper as it appears in Roots and Branches, however, gives the letter only a passing reference, as merely 'an encouraging letter' (p. 41), compared with the paper as it originally appeared (before being extensively revised for Roots and Branches) in Lembas Extra for 1995. The latter includes not only the words quoted from the letter in the second edition of The Road to Middle-earth, but also further text before and after. (The paper was originally an address at King Edward's School in 1992.)