50th Anniversary: Ace Pirated Edition Ignited Tolkien Craze

[Extollager]

Read about the unauthorized paperback edition of LOTR that jump-started the hobbit craze of 1965-1967 or so.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/unauthorized-lord-rings/

Tolkien's American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, worked with Ballantine Books to create the authorized paperback editions of Tolkien's works. Tolkien's popularity brought unwelcome attention to a private man, but he began to earn far greater royalties.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

unauthorized paperback edition of LOTR that jump-started the hobbit craze of 1965-1967

I don't think it "jump-started" it at all. You give criminals too much credit. Of course while USA is poisoning the world with DRM and RIAA and has the evil Millennium copyright act the USPTO is still handing out fake patents to US companies, US Radio STILL doesn't pay complete performance royalites, Google is stealing IP, and the Ace edition was then just yet another US copyright violation common from the early Victorian era.

It's not something to celebrate.

 

[Extollager]

I don't think it "jump-started" it at all. You give criminals too much credit.

Yes, what law was that again?

But seriously, Ray -- sure, Ace's exploitation of the carelessness of Tolkien's hardcover publishers was to be deplored. I'd have joined in the campaign for the Ballantine edition if I'd been old enough and aware of what was going on. (I don't think I ever saw the Ace editions till the 1970s, years after they were no longer produced.) But though Ace's action brought down on them a great deal of disapprobation, the fact remains that the appearance of Tolkien's books in paperback, especially after Ballantine issued the authorized editions and Ace agreed to pay royalties and not reprint their edition, did get them into the hands of innumerable readers who loved them, and provided the basis for Tolkien's late years of prosperity.

Can anyone contend that these things were about to happen apart from Ace? I know of no evidence that Allen and Unwin in England, or Houghton Mifflin in the US, Tolkien's hardcover publishers, were seriously looking into an agreement for the paperbacking of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In hardcover the Rings set had had only a modest success.

We may assume that the books would eventually have been issued in paper, I guess. But I am glad that the author was able to benefit from the financial success of his "trilogy" for about eight years before his death. It was, I have little doubt, also primarily readers of the books in paperback who let Tolkien know, in one way and another, that there was a very eager and large audience waiting for The Silmarillion, etc. That must have been pleasing to him even while, admittedly, he felt some anxiety about the matter given that he had become elderly and his narrative creativity had ebbed. When Tolkien senior died, Christopher Tolkien must have had no doubt that the Silmarillion materials, in some form, must be published.

As for the non-Ace criminality, would a different forum be a better place to discuss it?

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I bought the Ace editions of The Fellowship and The Two Towers, since I had no idea they were unauthorized. I bought the Ballentine edition of The Return of the King (with that awful, awful cover art) and later bought Ballentine editions of the two I had, plus The Hobbit.

Did the unauthorized editions help Tolkien in the end? I bet they did, and for the reasons that Extollager suggests. As it happens, The Return of the King was the first book in the trilogy I bought, but not because of the cover! It was because I had read a review (by someone who might or might not have bought the Ace edition, I have no way of knowing or even conjecturing). I then went and frantically searched for the other two volumes which, when I found them, happened to be the Ace editions. The Ace art is a lot more appealing than the Ballentine art, and I wonder how many copies the trilogy would have sold if there had only ever been the Ballentine editions. That doesn't excuse Ace for what they did. On the other hand, what they did was legal.

 

[J-Sun]

What's not to be celebrated is:

Betsy Wollheim: "When he called up Professor Tolkien in 1964 and asked if he could publish Lord of the Rings as Ace paperbacks, Tolkien said he would never allow his great works to appear in so ‘degenerate a form’ as the paperback book."''
...
Tolkien: the "campaign in U.S.A. has gone well. 'Ace Books' are in quite a spot, and many institutions have banned all their products. They are selling their pirate edition quite well, but it is being discovered to be very badly and erroneously printed; and I am getting such an advt. from the rumpus that I expect my 'authorized' paper-back will in fact sell more copies than it would, if there had been no trouble or competition."

Sounds like an elitist and an opportunist. Paperbacks are degenerate (and the people who can afford to buy only those? what are they?) but the money's all the same color after all, hey?

 

[Extollager]

On "degenerate" paperbacks -- I wouldn't assume this was simply a "class" thing. Paperbacks, American ones perhaps more than British (?), were associated with sleazy covers, cheap paper, poor typography, and sensationalist content. If I had dedicated 12 years the writing of a book and put my soul into it, and seen it published in a decent hardcover edition, I too might be dismayed by the prospect of paperback editions.

Tolkien might have seen what American paperbackers did to his friend Lewis's science fiction. Here is the tasteful dust wrapper of the first British edition of Perelandra:

The first US edition was also agreeably designed:

Now here are the covers of a couple of American paperbacks of the same book:

And again it's not just a matter of the cover art, but of the whole "presentation."

 

[J-Sun]

On "degenerate" paperbacks -- I wouldn't assume this was simply a "class" thing.... Tolkien might have seen what American paperbackers did to his friend Lewis's science fiction. Here is the tasteful dust wrapper of the first British edition of Perelandra:

Now here are the covers of a couple of American paperbacks of the same book....And again it's not just a matter of the cover art, but of the whole "presentation."

Fair enough - the article does mention that he was distressed by the covers - ironically, of the Ballantines where, like Teresa, he preferred the "pirated" Ace covers - but it still could be a class thing (and/or a UK/US thing). You could argue the hardcovers are boring and the paperbacks are colorful and attention-getting. "Can't have my fantasy of orcs and wizards looking fun or anything less than 'adult'."

Of course, Wollheim was notorious enough (for instance, trashing the Foundation trilogy in cut variant title paperbacks) that he had the joke made about him [attributed to Terry Carr] that he would reprint the Bible as an Ace Double: War God of Israel backed by The Thing with Three Souls (or something like that).

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Might be a bit of both: Tolkien being something of a snob on the matter, and the fact that paperbacks at the time were printed on cheap paper and often came with sleazy covers (the Perelandra covers pretty much make that point).

Fortunately, neither the Ace covers for LOTR nor the Ballantine ones (ghastly as they were) were trashy, which might have reconciled Tolkien somewhat to the idea, even apart from the money.

 

[Extollager]

Really, one must sympathize with Tolkien's distaste for the idea of paperbackery. I have an even choicer example of American paperbacking, which Tolkien might well have seen, shown him by his friend C. S. Lewis.

Here is the first British edition:

Now, from America, here is one of the Avon paperbacks!

I own a copy of this, and a scruffy thing it is. The novel is one of my top ten science fiction novels, a poetic masterpiece that I have read about 15 times. The Avon cover art is not only trashy; it apparently was art stock on hand; the figure and the spacecraft look nothing like the protagonist of Lewis's novel or the globular space vessel that Lewis describes in a number of places. Tolkien might well wonder what horrors would be perpetrated on his masterpiece should it be paperbacked....

 

[J-Sun]

Actually, the first one is again, boring, and the second is cool. More pertinently, the first is vague fuzzy pastel seeming-laziness and the second is bright, definite, and vigorous. Stock art is not something unique to paperbacks, anyway. (But that should have been used on a van Vogt book - and maybe was. ) "You can't judge a book by its cover" and it doesn't affect what's on the inside. The author's purpose should be at least in great part to communicate and those paperbacks with their vivid covers communicate to a lot more people than stodgy expensive hardcovers. (I'm not saying you should pitch your stuff to the lowest common denominator and try to communicate with everyone but that you shouldn't put up arbitrary restrictions to keep the hoi polloi out unless you're, indeed, an elitist author.)

Sorry, though - I feel like I'm at least partly responsible for taking this off-topic - point is we're supposed to be talking about the year Fantasy Began to Take Over the World which is agreed by almost everyone to have begun with the US paperback success of Tolkien's books over his objections by Ace (and with his forced blessing by Ballantine). This isn't something I can personally celebrate (and, indeed, many fans of fantasy do not, seeing it sort of corrupt individually creative fantastic writing) but it's certainly an interesting social and "fiction"al phenomenon.

I am curious (if this is on-topic rather than taking it off again) - while there's pretty good consensus on the Tolkien movement (which led to Ballantine's fantasy line and so on) it seems like to me there was a second wind sometime between - I dunno, '85-95? - in which the burgeoning Brooks' and Donaldsons and Eddings and so on were replaced by a whole new level of fantasy frenzy. I mean, SF was still dominant in the late 60s and 70s and holding its own in the 80s but seems to have become second banana sometime after that. Is it purely an inertial thing from the mid-60s with those mostly 70s/80s guys becoming yet bigger or was there some other additional weight thrown in? I mean, I guess Potter was the coup de grace but that was 1997-2007. Was there something between?