Many Thanks for confirming that. Much Appreciated.

11! That's just not fair Beren!

The number on the delivery box matches the number inside on mine too. So I suppose for those who want to keep a copy totally unopened this is pretty useful (particularly if you sell it in the future.)

I got 58 - happy with that. Have to have a closer look at this 'flaky' problem; didn't notice the first time I had a (careful) look.

(From a purely aesthetic bibliographical perspective; not a collecting one) the nice thing is you can handle it (and will be able to if your so inclined); what with it being full leather. Unlike those 1/4 leather black cloth incarnations from a few years back. That cloth (after a good bit of handling) looks too prone to threading & showing grubby marks. At least in 50 years time this edition should still be in sound condition. Although the lettering and helm might not fair so well! Case it a nice touch too.

Anyway, it is nice...

BH

remy you must have got a pretty small number if you ordered in the morning. The times I gave were just when the emails arrived in my inbox. I didn't get to check my mail until that evening. So I didn't order & pay until about 8 o'clock in the eveing of the 19th. In fact the 10 o'clock email from TolkienStore was in my junk folder!

Just had a close (close) look at my copy. There are some tiny areas of blue showing through the gold on the front, but nothing I wouldn't have expected.

Close examination of the leather shows that... well its a piece of leather -and isn't perfect. My copy also looks a bit scuffed around one of the corners on the inside; but its just where the leather has been tooled round and gathered under the glued endpaper.

The gold lettering/design (generally) doesn't look too robust, but has anyone got any books where this kind of workmanship looks like it could be roughly handled (esp. when onto leather)?

For those of you with copies sitting on the otherside of the world in packaging - the choice of returning any damaged copy is also impractical. By the time you guys get to see your copies, HC will probably not have any copies for you to replace it with in any case. I think the poster on the HC forums is just being a little too picky. This is a physically made book after all; it's not meant to be perfect.

Nice!...

Khamul, Well I still have not taken the books out of the shrinkwrap yet, but if the numbers on the Shipping Labels do indeed match the books, then it looks like I got copy number 5 and copy number 6.

So it looks like Harpercollins probably did distribute the books based on the sequence in which they were ordered.

5 and 6! Cool!