Went to yard sales today and came back with a bit of Tolkien loot. One - which was held inside a stable because why not - yielded Ballantine paperbacks of The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. I did googling when I got home and apparently they're the editions that Ballantine came out with in response to the famous Ace Books editions from the 60s. Surprisingly good condition all around for their age; although The Hobbit has what looks like some coffee stains on the cover, but nothing major. The covers were painted by an artist named Barbara Remington who,
according to this website, only read the books after she had done the covers. Apparently she didn't have time to read them before hand because of a deadline, so he asked friends who had read the books to give her an overview of the series. Talk about winging it! She succeeded too.
Then at a church yard sale, someone was selling a
Gandalf action figure from the LOTR movies for a dollar! That sucker will be sitting on top of my stereo.
One thing that I find interesting/amusing about the Ballantines is the statement from J. R. R. Tolkien himself on the back cover of all three books:
You can practically feel how ticked off he was about Ace releasing those paperbacks without his consent. Pretty understandable, but fortunately, he did end up getting quite a bit of loot from those sales and it really helped the fantasy genre as a whole by widening the readership.
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