# Help with paperback editions



## Deni (Jan 6, 2021)

Hi everyone. Need a bit of help from some of you knowledgeable people  Anyway, I have hardback editions in my native language, but I wanted to buy paperbacks in English. Now, when collecting, I _need _to have everything the same size, with the same cover, style etc..

So anyway, bought these today (in paperback):

Beren and Lúthien - The Official Tolkien Online Bookshop

The Fall of Gondolin - The Official Tolkien Online Bookshop

Could you help me complete my collection by helping my find the other books in this particular style?

Is this part of the same collection, as the edition is quite a bit older?

The Children of Húrin - The Official Tolkien Online Bookshop

I can't seem to find the other ones in this particular style, nor illustrated paperback like these are..


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## Olorgando (Jan 6, 2021)

Hi Deni, welcome to TTF. 

To start with your last question first:

CoH was the first of the three "Great Stories" of The Silmarillion to be published.
I have all three in hardback, published 2007 (CoH), 2017 (B&L) and 2018 (FoG).
I suppose what could make these three a sort of mini-series is the fact that all three were illustrated by Alan Lee.
The covers on my hardbacks look a quite a bit more uniform, all more subdued in their colors, sort of a touched-up grey.

One question I would have is what you would consider a collection.
I would guess the core collection would be The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth - perhaps adding the overall index published a few years after volume 12; and perhaps the three "Great Tales".

As my adventure of collecting works by and about JRRT started about 35 years ago, you might imagine that uniformity is the last thing to be found.
Perhaps a third of my books are hardback, not a few bought so I could continue re-reading stuff, which was getting difficult with the tattered paperbacks (though I have kept these venerable "veterans"). Some of the paperbacks are what I believe is called "trade paperback" in the anglophone world, with the quality of the paper often better than that of some hardbacks. And if you start hunting for books *about* JRRT, including lexicons, that makes easily more than a dozen authors / editors, and not all if them were published by HarperCollins (UK and rest of world) or Houghton Mifflin (US).

Just a little trivia tidbit: my first books, including the first two volumes of HoMe, were by Unwin Paperbacks, then still George Allen & Unwin; that became Unwin Hyman with volume 3, then Grafton (an imprint published by HarperCollins, but the - hardback versions - originally by Unwin Hyman) for volumes 7 and 8, and finally HarperCollins as original publishers. Except for volume 12, which is a Houghton Mifflin hardback ... 😵


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