The Hobbit (Deluxe Limited Edition)

TOLKIEN, J.R.R. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. London: HarperCollins, 2023.

4to. Quarter green leatherette with raised ribs to spine, stamped in three foils, over black cloth boards. All edges gilt. Ribbon marker. xxxix, 272, [ii] pp., complete text printed in two colours throughout. Illustrated with over fifty sketches, drawings, paintings and maps by the author. Accompanied by Mathoms: A Treasury of Writings, an 88-page illustrated booklet with essays by contributing authors, bound in green cloth; two poster-sized fold-out maps of Thror's Map and Wilderland; and a printed art card reproducing Tolkien's original dust jacket painting. Housed in custom-built green cloth slipcase. First edition thus. Illustrated by the author.

The Hobbit was published on the twenty-first of September 1937, written for Tolkien's own children and never originally intended for audience in the wider world. That it found a substantial one is one of the great accidents of twentieth-century literary history. 

This 2023 deluxe edition marks the first time the complete range of Tolkien's own artwork for the book has been gathered within its pages: not simply the finished paintings and drawings familiar from earlier editions, but the full breadth of his creative process — preliminary sketches, coloured drawings, and cartographic studies that have previously appeared only in exhibition catalogues and scholarly publications. The result is the most visually comprehensive edition of the text yet produced, and the one that comes closest to revealing the imaginative world Tolkien himself inhabited as he wrote.

The edition matches HarperCollins's ongoing series of deluxe Tolkien volumes and is accompanied by the Mathoms booklet — a treasury of contextual writings by scholars and admirers of the book — and by two poster-sized fold-out maps and a facsimile of Tolkien's original dust jacket design. Accompanied by the original publisher's sales prospectus.

Fine in a near fine slipcase showing only minor shelf wear.

Catalogue Number: HH000361