"The world isn't in your books and maps, it's out there"
By TOLKIEN, John Ronald Reuel , 1938

The Hobbit.

  • 作者: TOLKIEN, John Ronald Reuel
  • 出版地: London,
  • 出版商: Allen & Unwin,
  • 发布日期: 1937.
  • 物理描述: First edition, second impression. Octavo (190 by 135mm), 310 pages, frontispiece and 13 full-page illustrations, four in colour, after drawings by Tolkien, cartographic endpapers printed in red, black, and white, light green cloth over boards, imprinted with a stylized Misty Mountains scene in deep blue ink along the top, and a dragon at the bottom, both front and back, dust jacket printed in green, black, dark blue, and white, showing a drawing of stylized mountains with the moon and eagles soaring above, a forest, and a river, dust jacket is slightly discoloured and with some foxing, two small skilfully repaired tears and to top.
  • 库存参考: 22641

笔记

The Book
By December 15 1937, the first printing of 'The Hobbit' was sold out and a second impression was quickly prepared.

Originally 2,300 copies were printed as "Second Impression 1937" (although it was actually published in January 1938), but 423 unbound copies were destroyed in 1940 by a fire at the bindery of Key & Whiting caused by German bombing during the Blitz. This means that just 1877 copies - 300 more the first impression - survived to point of sale.

The Maps
The second printing includes four plates now in colour. The line drawing of 'The Hill: Hobbiton Across the Water' on page four was replaced by a colour frontispiece of 'The Hill: Hobbiton Across the Water'. Three other colour plates were added: 'The Fair Valley of Rivendell' facing page 59, 'Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft Elves', facing page 192, and 'Conversation with Smaug', facing page 228. The second impression is the only UK first edition published with four colour and nine monochrome illustrations. The coloured illustrations "had been commissioned for the first American edition, and were in the American publisher's hands when Allen & Unwin decided to include them in the second impression. The original art was called back for reproduction in Britain, then returned across the Atlantic" (Hammond & Anderson, p15).

"It may have been a surprise to its publishers that a work as sui generis as The Hobbit should have been a popular success, but once it was a success there can have been no surprise in the clamour for a sequel. Tolkien had opened up a new imaginative continent, and the cry now was to see more of it" (Shippey).

Middle Earth: "[is] one of [the twentieth] century's lasting contributions to that borderland of literature between youth and age. There are few such books: "Gulliver's Travels, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows" what else?: [They are] destined to become this century's contribution to that select list of books which continue through the ages to be read by children and adults with almost equal pleasure" (Eyre).

参考书目

  1. Eyre, 67, 134-135
  2. Hammond and Anderson, A3
  3. Shippey, 49.

图片库

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