Chica Chubb in Middle-earth

These might be close to my favourite set of The Lord of the Rings. They are the third British dust-jacket (wrapper) design iteration and reigned supreme from 1973 to ‘85. These are the ‘73 impressions, the box was not released until ‘78 but I managed to convince a seller to part it from the books he was selling. Then coated the inside with gold card. 😏 **Originally posted at work today. I like how no one mentioned that half the original post was filled with my text instructions to a trucking company.

This is a rare little Tolkien book, the second edition of “Tree and Leaf” and the first to include the poem “Mythopoeia” Only two thousand copies were printed on the first go round and it was not reprinted so effectively it is a limited edition—and so only the same or a lower number (given entropy) of people can ever own one at any one moment in the entire past and future light-cone of the space time continuum! **I got mine at a next to nothing price because it did not have a dust-jacket. (And here is the lesson for people de-jacketing books - the dust-jacket is about 90-95% of the value of a collectible book. Lose it and it loses nearly all resale value on the secondary market.) Luckily another collector was kind enough to scan a high resolution copy and I managed to print a fairly decent replacement. I never intend to sell the book anyway. The gold lettering did lose a little lustre though. The last image is the more readily available (later) HarperCollins paperback which also includes the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth