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A New Glossary of the Dialect of the ...

32200553212

£55.20

Availability:

Check at Abebooks.com

Ex library but a good price even so

Laurin wrote:

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THE HOBBIT BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN ILLUSTRATED BY ALAN LEE, CG B70

388421650628

Seller: bhf_shops

(817976)

Ends May 22, 2025 8:28:41 PM UTC

£9.50

[2 Bids]

The title page in the listing is from a US edition, very strange.

There are 250 signed copies which have been reserved for the Canadian market. Could they have a Houghton Mifflin title page? The one for sale has The Harper Collins logo on the spine and Houghton Mifflin on the title page.
Also the listing doesn't say if the book is actually signed and limited, but does precise that this is an ex library book, which is very unusual for this edition.

If anyone wants to buy this, I would contact the seller for clarification, as there do seem to be issues with the listing.

I personally have never seen one with a HMH title page, but as has been mentioned already, some were produced for Canada. However Houghton Mifflin was the US publisher at the time and not the Canadian. Very weird here, it's either a very interesting item and scarce or a scam.

The seller has quite a few sales with negative feedback, although when you've sold 2,600,000 items, that will happen. Most of them comment on damage from shipping with bad packaging. Here is a recent one on some books:

Given the large scale nature of this operation their descriptions and packaging leave a great deal to be desired. I paid over £100n for this incomplete set only to find they had been sloppily thrown into a large box...without any proper protection or padding and held "together" by a single elastic band. This is wanton amateurism of the worst kind. Inevitably the books arrive rubbed and damaged and have to be returned, BHF,,amateur descriptions and packing,,professional prices

I have a personal "I'll roll the dice on one questionable thing" policy with eBay, here I see three questionable things:

1. Never seen one of these with HM imprint on the title page
2. "BOOK CONTAINS LIBRARY STAMPS" but no pictures of said stamps. I find it really unlikely that this book was in a library. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what they mean by "library".
3. Seller has a history of delicate items arriving damaged

Hard pass unless it goes for an unusually low price.

Title page is also identical to the one from the 1997 trade edition hardcover HM Hobbit (although perhaps that's expected if some of these 1997 deluxe editions were indeed printed by HM). The listing also mentions a dust jacket in "good" condition and the deluxe edition does not have a dust jacket. The trade edition does though.

Way too many question marks for me, as much as I'd like a copy of this!