For anyone looking at this one, take note of the picture of the spine. Appears to have weird issues with the leather bonding around the spine hubs. Looks a bit of a mess, IMHO.
Scarce 1966 printing of the 3rd edition, 17th impression overall of The Hobbit from 1937. The first printing of the 3rd edition Unwin Books paperback, the 1966 16th impression, was withdrawn due to a problem with the adhesive failing between the text block and the covers, causing the book to fall apart. Only a dozen or so copies of the 16th impression are know to exist, making the 16th impression of the Unwin 3rd edition paperback one of the hardest Tolkien books to find. The 17th impression is more obtainable, but scarce.
Never heard this before, and would need some proper citations to consider it to be correct.
It isn’t correct. It is pure supposition. I believe Neil H saw correspondence from A&U regarding unspecified binding problems and that is it. The rest is the dealer making stuff up to try and make the non-rare 17th seem like it is the first impression that got wide distribution.
The 12 known copies come from northman’s list of the usual suspects. I think it is a good basis for noting the 16th is uncommon, but I don’t doubt that the real number produced must have been considerably higher (the 25,000 number doesn’t seem plausible to me — I’d guess without evidence in the hundreds).
The 16ths do seem to fall apart, but I doubt they would have been falling apart when new. Just seems to be the adhesive drying out as is common on paperbacks of the era. My copy had the first dozen pages loose, but the rest seemed to still be holding well.
It's the second-cheapest one on Abe right now :shrug: This site seems to think nearly everything is overpriced. In collecting it's worth what someone will pay for it.
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