Christian History Home > Issue 78 > An Unexpected Party
An Unexpected Party
Like Bilbo discovering one dwarf after another at his door, Tolkien found himself, in the 1960s, hosting a growing American fan club.
Michael Foster | posted 4/01/2003 12:00AM
The sudden boom in the popularity of The Lord of the Rings in the mid-1960s began with the simple fact that it became available in paperback.
An unauthorized American edition arising from a seeming loophole in the book's copyright stirred Tolkien's publishers like a sleeping dragon roused.
In October 1965, Ballantine published an approved and slightly revised three-volume edition at 95 cents each. Now anyone with three dollars could buy a passport to Middle-earth.
By 1966, the book was the top-selling paperback, with three quarters of a million copies in print.
Happy accident?
Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson (author of The Annotated Hobbit) believes it was "an accident of chronology" that The Lord of the Rings found a wide audience thirty years after Tolkien began writing it and ten years after its first publication.
"Part of it has to do with the rise of mass market publishing, and the fact that a mass market edition came out in 1965 surely spurred things along. Before then, the hardcovers ... To view this item, you must be a member of ChristianHistory.net.
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