Likely the photo. Over the course of time, if you look at newsletter and social media promo photos like these of books; they add a filter to them because it’s the trendy and vibe thing nowadays.

The late Stu wrote:

If those jackets are representative of the final edition, they are quite rough and oversaturated compared to the original jackets. Huge amounts of additional blue as well. Of course, might just be the photo.

At first glance, I would say that it is indeed the photo processing :
1) it really does not match the colour tones usually used by Alan Lee
2) the first images in real view shared by Harper Collins are often saturated

these are beautiful. that new box art is really something. While I understand why, I’m still sad it’s just TOLKIEN on the spine though :\

Some pictures of the UK Boxed Set and the other Christopher Tolkien boxed sets #1-5, original UK editions and the US HmCo Great Tales boxed set.

Looks pretty sharp! What’s the new artwork in each book (as per the boxed set’s product description) like?

they look terrific !

Is it just me or do they actually do look a bit blue-er compared to the previous ones?

Thanks for sharing the photos, Trotter.

They look fine though I still don’t understand the impetus to do a boxset almost identical to one that already existed. If they really wanted to make this a “matching” set with the others, they should have made the jackets reversible with a solid color scheme. I would have bought this set if so.

Foxrook wrote:

Is it just me or do they actually do look a bit blue-er compared to the previous ones?

Not just you. They have a lot more blue than the original HarperCollins. The original US CoH used a different colour palette entirely (than the UK), so mucking around with the colours on this stuff is fairly par for the course.

Eye_of_the_Black_Tower wrote:

Looks pretty sharp! What’s the new artwork in each book (as per the boxed set’s product description) like?

May take a while to produce this.

As an example, the page numbering for Fall of Gondolin has been redone, and it now also includes a list of illustrations as well as plates.

The main new artwork is the box art, which is Túrin and the Dragon © 2025 Alan Lee