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   An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography

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Links to Bibliography Pages

The Bibliography

1910-1937 - The Early Years

1937 - The Hobbit

1938-1953 - The Middle Years

1954-1955 - The Lord of the Rings

1955-1973 - The Later Years

1974-1990 - After Tolkien Part 1

1991-2010 - After Tolkien Part 2

Boxed Sets & Books in Slipcases

Languages and Alphabets

Other Credits

"Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with
 things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions."
from Concerning Hobbits by J.R.R. Tolkien

Ring and Eye Device from the dust jacket of The Lord of the RingsTolkienBooks.net aims to list all British editions of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) published between 1910 and 2010, and to illustrate changes to the texts and covers.

The site was put together to act as a companion piece to a book called J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography by Wayne G. Hammond. This is a veritable mine of useful information for the Tolkien collector - if you don’t own a copy, find one! Bibliography entries include page references to the bok. The site also includes a few items that were unknown to Wayne, and points out a small number of possible errors and misinterpretations.

Obviously, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings sections are the largest areas of the bibliography, but there is a lot more to see - try the 1938-1953 section - it includes Farmer Giles of Ham as well as some pretty obscure and hard to find academic publications - or the Boxed and Slipcased Sets section. There are also some very interesting items in the 1910-1937 section, ranging from his early poetry to some of his most important work on Old and Middle English. Each section is split into subsections, which appear as galleries of thumbnail images.

Click on a thumbnail to see a larger image, details of the edition and any reprints.

Books are presented in order of the year of first issue and are grouped together with later printings and editions following on from the first edition. There is one image for most books, and articles are being added to fully illustrate the more important and hard to find editions. Bibliography entries give details of the edition, year of publication, publisher, format and ISBN (if applicable), together with details of any illustrations, later reprints and other handy snippets of information.

As a general rule only British editions are listed, unless there isn’t one of course! Where there is only a ‘foreign’ edition, it will be listed together with any other significant reprints and variants. For a few of the older items, that are particularly difficult to find, some non-British appearances are also listed.
Devon Press, a fellow collector, has compiled an excellent guide to American editions at TolkienBooks.US.

 
If you are looking for new, secondhand or out-of-print books then AbeBooks UK may be able to help.
 
Alternatively, you can search and order through AbeBooks.com.
AbeBooks.com. Thousands of booksellers - millions of books.
Text © Neil Holford and TolkienBooks.net 2003-2024 --- Images and quoted text remain copyright of the respective publishers and authors
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