Just for comparison, here is a link to an auction that appears to be authentic. Notice the difference in the ink. The real one looks like a standard pen (maybe ball point, roller ball) the other looks like a fine tip sharpie.

http://cgi.ebay.com/CHILDREN-OF-HURIN ... ZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This is sad, not only for this auction, but because the ease of forgery with these bookplates certainly reduces the value of the real ones. The only real way to avoid this is special limited editions that only exist in signed form. It is much harder to produce a facsimile of a special binding.

That COH / Hobbit combo certainly does look to be a fake. One thing to keep in mind - I know of zero instances that the bookplates were put into books other than The Children of Hurin.

There are US trade editions with bookplates, and British trade editions and a handful of British Deluxe editions. There were no loose bookplates that I know of.

If you look at that dodgy auction image, even the helm emblem looks like it was scanned in at very low resolution - the lines are very fat and smudged compared with the fine thin lines in the original bookplate:

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Hmm, this ad looks like it was written by the same seller who had the COH with the Alan Lee and Ted Nasmith illustrations (all lower-case, "piccadilli," etc). It is very suspicous.

I don't think it is the same people, after all the seller with the previous adverts was actually at Waterstones, but they are guilty of selling the scanned image on Ebay and starting what will be a huge problem in fake bookplates. I have given up reporting these to Ebay, as they don't care if they are fakes as long as they get their money for selling the item.

Rowns, what has happened to the number of posts they all went back to zero?

I fixed the posts count for now, but we may lose them again until I can patch a bug that is triggered by a spammer in the news comments section. It's an easy patch to get the counts back, but I want to take my time on core changes so we don't lose anything key on the site.