Eric,

You need to avoid the Book Club Editions (also often sold as 'First American Edition') which are smaller in size and printed on poor quality paper and do not have cloth on the boards. The standard trade hardback editions are all consistent in height (although the dustjackets for Return of the Shadow, Treason of Isengard, War of the Ring and Sauron Defeated are different in style than the other books, having white covers with Alan Lee paintings, rather than the non-illustrated coloured covers that the other books share).

I have attached a picture of my US and UK 1sts, so you can see what they look like.

I actually got caught out when I purchased my first copy of BoLT1, thinking it was a trade US 1/1 and ended up with a Book Club Edition that was too small. It is still sitting in a box somewhere, but I learned a valuable lesson from that $9.95 purchase, which was to check facts before bidding! The correct US 1/1 BoLT that I got a few weeks later cost me less than $15.00, so these books are not at all expensive if you are prepared to take yor time. From memory, the least I paid was about $10 and the most expensive about $30, and that's all for 1st/1sts.

Good Luck!

Rgds
Stu

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I just had a brainwave and started a new transaction on the website to see what defaults for the addresses it would give me - and guess what - the default billing and delivery addresses were correct (bill home, deliver work), so it definitely just looks like HC making a transcription cock-up when they processed the order.

Hopefully it's a one off and not too many people have been cought out in the same way.

Stu

Well, I just got the invoice copy through to my work address this morning, and it has the delivery and billing addresses reversed.

I guess there is always the possibility that I made a mistake filling out the web-form and did it in reverse (although to be honest it doesn't seem that likely, given that I have several orders from them all with differing addresses).

With the last order (for the SuperDeluxe) I did with them I also had different billing and delivery addresses and they sent *both* the item and the invoice (separately) to the delivery address, so I suspect they manually transcribe the information from the web system and sometimes it gets done incorrectly.

It's a pity that the confirmation emails and screens on the tolkien.co.uk website don't show the address details as it makes it impossible to verify what got entered after the fact. I guess it's the problem of a wholesaler trying to act like a retailer without the systems in place to support doing so.

Presumably the info will be in their web-order system somewhere, so hopefully I will find out if it was their error or I'm getting senile.

Stu

Edit: long-winded, rambling explanation replaced by concise version:

HC dispatched my Tolkien Deluxe Collection boxed set to the (currently unoccupied) Billing address on my order instead of the delivery address, and it sat outside the house (thanks to UPS requiring no signature) and went AWOL.

After some discussion with HC (which took a while as the person dealing with the Tolkien site was away), this has been resolved and they sent me a replacement set to the correct address.

Stu

>I just noticed today that this book is also for sale through Beren's website--Tolkien Library. I guess it must be pretty legit then even though it lacks a provenance.

Yes, the Tolkien library shop essentially points to David Miller's (i.e. Tolkien Bookshelf's) store. The presence of an item on the Tolkien Library store has no real bearing - IMHO - on the legitimacy of that item or the accuracy of its description. Actually, some of the descriptions that David Miller uses for items on the Tolkien Library store are a bit questionable: e.g. describing a book [#000444] as "mint condition, opened only to inspect" and "mint unread condition" on the one hand (in bold) and then stating "a few spots of foxing on the limitation notice" (in normal typeface) on the other. It's either mint or has foxing, not both. In this case, looking at the picture, it can be seen that the foxing is quite severe and the book is not "mint" at all.

I've seen a few examples of this in the store, and they have always really irked me. They may just be cut and paste errors, but I believe these are all things that impact on the credibility of the seller.

I'm not saying this particular item [the signed book] is not legit, as I really don't have enough expertise to judge (although I reserve the right to form an opinion). However, I don't think it is a safe assumption that one can authenticate an item simply because the seller happens to have an association with someone you happen to trust (in this case, Beren). I think each item needs to be judged on its merit.


Stu