About this Item
Allen and Unwin sold at Foyles Bookstore in London. Book complete, but much wear and tear as printed with war time paper. No dust jacket, facsimile provided free so you could see the orange dust jacket with what some refer to as the Monopoly man Hobbit, very ugly, but an important part of Tolkien history. I have sold only one original jacket of this editions in my 25 years in business. Hundreds of copies of the A&U 1942 3rd printing were destroyed in a warehouse fire during an air raid in London, Thus the Hobbit 1942 3rd printing remains the most scarce, even perhaps more than a 1st/1st. (see my other listing) The reprinting under the Imprint Children's book club allowed A&U to reproduce it . Hard back books were very costly to print so this would have been a financial blow to the publisher and Tolkien himself. As these were for children and cheaply made, few survive and usually found in this worn condition. Various marks and stains, but still whole and solid. A very rare Hobbit. The Hobbit First editions: Possibly uniquely in children's publishing, when The Hobbit came out in 1937, it contained quite a few things in that first edition that are much different to the book as we know it now in the second and later editions. Some of the changes were made because The Hobbit was being drawn into the larger stories in Middle earth and was becoming far more serious and darker. Firstly, in that first edition Bilbo at the Unexpected Party had sandwiches with tomatoes in them - tomatoes are of course from the New World, so Tolkien changed that in the second edition to pickles. Indeed, Tolkien spends quite some time in Letters explaining how potatoes might have existed, as well as tobacco - both New World varieties. In this case, Tolkien cleverly used 'taters' and 'pipeweed', thus obscuring the origin of the plants in question. The second and largest and most significant change was to the chapter 'Riddles in the Dark', where the last section of the chapter is completely different. Gollum, having lost the riddle game to the Hobbit, apologises profusely and offers to lead Bilbo out as compensation for the gift he would have given him (presumably the magic ring). He takes him so far along the tunnels, and then gets suspicious, and Bilbo then has to get past him - overhearing Gollum's talk to himself that reveals that the ring is capable of making him invisible. The Hobbit originally in 1937 had no link to Middle earth and the magic ring was just an equaliser device to give Bilbo some edge and extra powers to become 'heroic' when he was not brave or very resourceful. Since changing the text would have required all the metal plates for printing being recast anew, this was no small change.
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