A post ( https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienbooks/ ... /1f33dcx/misprint_or_not/ ) leads me to investigate the printing issue of History of Middle-earth. Namely, in p98 of The Return of the Shadow, misprint originated from type damage is too obvious to miss.



This issue enters since 2010 hardcover; it is not present in 1994 paperback. Apparently HC scanned a poorly printed set for the 2010 release, and used the scan for all following reprints and editions. So I randomly chose another page and zoomed in:



And it is of course not only present in RotS, but in all photo offset books. (These wobbly letters was also noted earlier in this thread. It appears they used a low resolution setting in their scan.)



And it is of course not only in HoMe, but in all HC's reprints of old books before the digital era. The conversion from type to digital almost completely fails to check for OCR errors (2023 Letters and 1994 LR both have hundreds of typos), and the plates are photocopied from poorly printed originals (e.g. all the plates in LR are much worse after 1994, especially Doors of Durin).

I took a look at Morgoth’s Ring and the colour plate frontispiece. You can see that the colour wasn’t printed well in the 2024 hardcover just released - red is hypersaturated.

1993:


2024:

Does anyone know if the boxed sets are still in their first printings? Has any been reprinted by now?

Oren wrote:

Does anyone know if the boxed sets are still in their first printings? Has any been reprinted by now?

With an initial 1st print run of each of the four boxes in the multi-thousand range, I think it very unlikely that if one orders any of the four at the moment one will not still get a 1st printing. Boxset one came out nearly 10 months ago now, so it is obviously the most likely candidate at this point.