An interesting thread on the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza forum about among other things textual accuracy in recent editions of The Lord of the Rings.

"We're preparing for our blog a revised comparison of Lord of the Rings editions, as it's been over two years since our original post. But for now: the new deluxe one-volume edition has the most accurate text. Its new typesetting picked up all of the corrections we had noted. The new three-volume trade hardcover from HarperCollins (with the Tolkien-designed dust-jackets) was meant to be fully corrected also, but somehow was not, and it even compounded some existing problems. For example, we had noted in our online addenda and corrigenda that the first line of the poem 'All that is gold does not glitter' (p. 170, l. 9) needed to be indented, not set to the left; but this direction applied to the original 50th-anniversary setting (2004), and was already corrected in a post-2004 printing. For the new three-volume printing, the line should have been left where it (correctly) was, but instead has been indented further. We're told that further corrections will be made in later printings.

We had hoped, when editing the text for the 50th anniversary, that subsequently a single text file would be maintained and updated, from which later editions (hardcover, trade and mass-market paperbacks, etc.) would be derived. But our analysis shows that there are now several settings, with different sets of corrections or continued errors, being published parallel to one another, e.g. the text of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt one-volume hardcover LR differs from that of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt one-volume paperback. In only small points, of course, but those will matter to anyone concerned to have the most accurate text.

Wayne & Christina"


http://www.lotrplaza.com/showthread.p ... o-buy&p=626558#post626558