Congratulations, laurel! It's an illustration for the chapter 'Henry Morgan, Buccaneer' in From the Fury of the Northmen by Rhoda Power, published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, in 1957. The picture appears on p. 178.

Wayne & Christina

An original drawing by J.R.R. Tolkien is to be sold at auction by Tennants of Leyburn, North Yorkshire, on 13 April 2011. Drawn in pencil and coloured pencil, New Lodge, Stonyhurst depicts the garden of the guest house at which Tolkien stayed in Stonyhurst, Lancashire on three occasions. Tolkien made the drawing in August 1947 and gave it to the family who owned New Lodge. Currently a small reproduction may be seen on the auctioneer’s website, which lists the house estimate of the sale price as £15,000-20,000. The drawing is also reproduced, with better colour, in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, fig. 28.

We have no financial interest in this sale, and are posting information as a favour to the owner of the drawing, a friend who kindly allowed us to reproduce it in Artist and Illustrator sixteen years ago.

Wayne & Christina

nothing worse than having some (potentially) useless dud sitting taking up room on your shelves...

Alas for the completist Tolkien collector, who inevitably has a lot of useless duds. Speaking of which, Christina and I have Heiner's book, bought during one of Lulu's discount sales, so at least we didn't pay full price, but even then it wasn't good value for money. To begin with, the type is tiny, I would say no more than 6 pt., set very tight on a very long line, but with a huge top margin (nearly two inches) so everything appears to be falling off the page. The introductory biography of JRRT, and one of Christopher Tolkien, are both taken verbatim from Wikipedia, with all of their inherent problems. The book, which has the title Tolkien Bibliography, seems to be intended as a bibliography of both JRRT and Christopher.

Then comes a list of 'Primary Sources', arranged by editor or author, but with no consistency of approach or form and little attempt at accuracy or completeness. For instance, it begins with 'Gordon, E.V. and J.R.R. Tolkien' for the 1925 edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, even though Tolkien's name appears first in the book. Under 'Tolkien, J.R.R.', the order of the list of works is neither alphabetical nor chronological, and parts of it repeat. Roverandom is given under 'Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond' (as editors, not so noted), and John Rateliff's History of The Hobbit is tacked on at the end of the list under title, with 'Rateliff' mentioned only in a note about errata on John's website.

Next is a list of books about Tolkien, from 'Abanes, Richard' to 'Zimbardo, Rose A. and Neil D. Isaacs', which suddenly reverts to 'Croft, Janet Brennan' and another string of titles, and then another, and another. Then a list of articles begins - with no divisional header to indicate this - and carries on, in alphabetical order by author, for a few pages, until - once again without indication - turns into a list of works by Tolkien, by title, in chronological order. And then comes a list of books about Tolkien, by title, in no particular order. And this is just to p. 41, out of 157! The rest is just the same, with no rhyme or reason, though my guess would be - noticing bits of HTML garbage among the text - that James Heiner simply lifted a lot of this off of various websites and databases, tossed it into a word processing document, and didn't bother to do much cleaning up or editing, or provide an index.

Wayne

I thought all of Tolkien's library had the sticker on them but I guess these 'minor' items probably didn't.

Many of the items that were in Tolkien's library and that have appeared in the market have the posthumous library label affixed, but not all. Although the presence of the label is good evidence that an item did belong to Tolkien, its absence doesn't necessarily mean that the item did not. In the present case, it seems very likely that the offprint was sent to Tolkien, Leyerle having attended his lectures at Oxford in the fifties and having written to him separately in April 1967, the date of the inscription. Tolkien replied on 28 April 1967 to a letter from Leyerle - making no mention, however, of receiving an offprint.

Wayne

As far as I know, there were eight posters in this series, not dated but first published possibly in 1974. They have been variously noted as published by Camden Graphics, Poster Shops, and Posters by Post. Besides the five you have, there were also posters of Tolkien's Death of Smaug and the two Tolkien maps by Pauline Baynes.

Wayne