Since the only copyright notice in the book is to the Peterson Publishing Company, there's no acknowledgment of Tolkien's copyright, there's no mention of permission to reprint his poem, and Childs World at one time had the whole of the book online at Scribd, it's no wonder that the Tolkien Estate might object. We do wonder if the publisher knew that "Oliphaunt" is protected intellectual property, or believed that The Lord of the Rings had lost its American copyright, which it never did. Childs World issued Oliphaunt as one of a series of single poems for children, and all of the others, by either Robert Louis Stevenson or Edward Lear, are old enough to be in the public domain.

Wayne & Christina

Part Two is now up.

The magazine is also only for book buying staff at Waterstones (the only big bookseller chain left in the United Kingdom, hence the exclusivity) and was not available to the general public.


Sorry, we weren't aware of that. It looks just like something that would, and could, be distributed to book buyers in general.

Wayne & Christina

For what it's worth, Christina and I have checked our two first printings of Sauron Defeated (one is a book club edition), and both have 'be'; and the first paperback printing, from the following year, which has 'me'.

BTW, would one actually find this kind of very detailed information in the Hammond/Anderson Bibliography, I mean do they really record every single misprint or other error of any kind that was ever noted and subsequently corrected (or not, as may be)?? For example, would it answer this specific question?

I would have included the be/me point had I known about it, and will do so in the second edition of the Bibliography. I made it a policy to record all errors and corrections as far as I knew about them, for the sake of identifying copies and as a guide to the most accurate texts. Sauron Defeated was published in January 1992, however, the cutoff date for submitting my manuscript was summer of that year, and I was much occupied that spring with tracing changes to The Lord of the Rings and with preparing for the Tolkien Centenary Conference, so I didn't have time to examine Sauron Defeated in great detail. It's the last entry (A29a) in the first section of the Bibliography, except for a placeholder for the Houghton Mifflin edition (A29b), which wasn't published until October 1992.

Wayne

The first printing of the Pocket Hobbit was also distributed to Canada. We took a chance and ordered a copy from amazon.ca. This arrived this morning and happily has the "1" on the copyright page. It's a small hardcover in a dust-jacket and an extra paper band partly advertising The Art of The Hobbit.

Wayne & Christina