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Books - Fine Bindings
The Hobbit
In a fine binding by the Harcourt Bindery
Title The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Author J. R. R. Tolkien Printer / Publisher George Allen & Unwin Ltd Place of Publication London Edition 6th impression Format 8vo Binding Bound by the Harcourt Bindery in dark green morocco, the covers panelled with a gilt fillet and the front cover tooled in gilt at the lower fore-corner with a winged dragon, after one of Tolkien’s own drawings; spine with five raised bands ruled in gilt, lettered direct in the second and third compartments; combed marbled endpapers in green, white and violet. Collation Sixth impression, being the second printing of the second edition. 315 pp. Colour frontispiece (The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water), with the author’s black-and-white illustrations throughout, lacking original end-paper maps. Features Illustrated by the Author Date 1954 Condition Crisp and unrubbed; text block clean, with faint spotting to the preliminaries.
The 1951 second edition, issued as the fifth impression, carries Tolkien’s substantial revision of Chapter V, “Riddles in the Dark,” rewritten to bring the ring and Gollum into line with the sequel then in progress. In the original text Gollum wagers the ring on the riddle-game and, having lost, apologises and offers to lead Bilbo out by way of compensation; the revision replaced a courteous loser with a creature possessed by what it has lost — the single alteration that turned a children’s book into the first volume of something much larger.
The present impression followed in 1954, a few months before The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in July of that year: the last printing of The Hobbit to reach readers who did not yet know what Bilbo had picked up, the revised text already in place and the sequel it was revised for still unpublished.
The Harcourt Bindery of Boston, founded in 1900 and named for its first premises in Harcourt Street, is the oldest hand bindery in the United States and has bound continuously for American dealers and collectors ever since. The green goatskin echoes the publisher’s cloth.
$2,000