Too Many Books and Never Enough

In the Curse, er, Course of Reading

August 14, 2020

Wayne writes: I forgot to include in my list of recent reading Science and Human Values by Jacob Bronowski, HarperPerennial, 1990. It’s not the most coherent of Bronowski’s works, but it has its moments. Bronowski remarks, for example, that in 1665, when the twenty-two-year-old Isaac Newton was sitting in his garden at home while the University of Cambridge was closed due to plague (so familiar!), he saw an apple fall from a tree. But

what struck the young Newton at the sight was not the thought that the apple must be drawn to the earth by gravity; that conception was older than Newton. What struck him was the conjecture that the same force of gravity, which reaches to the top of the tree, might go on reaching out beyond the earth and its air, endlessly into space. Gravity might reach the moon: this was Newton’s new thought; and it might be gravity which holds the moon in her orbit.

I must remember this for the Great Astronomers course I’m co-teaching this fall.

There’s also an interesting discussion of the nature of the creative act, which in Bronowski’s view has to do with the recognition of two aspects, a ‘hidden likeness’ such as between Newton’s apple and the moon, which are then fused into one. He writes:

The poem [a work of Art] or the discovery [a work of Science] exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.

I was put in mind of Tolkien’s comments on the ‘sub-creative act’ in On Fairy-Stories.

Next up for my reading will be Ransom Riggs’ The Conference of the Birds, the fifth novel in the ‘Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children’ series, but first I’m re-reading the fourth novel, The Map of Days, to refresh my memory of what went before. Christina is putting together a list of her own reading for a future post.

Speaking of reading, I read in the Williams College catalogue a description of one of this fall’s courses, which refers to it as a curse: I hope that isn’t prophetic. Our local paper, meanwhile, has these double-takes:

‘The Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] is compromised of more than 8,000 voting members.’

‘tapping the breaks’ (i.e. brakes, for those who don’t drive)

‘Faith Leaders Must Stand for Moral Principals’ (not heads of schools)

I’ve also read, in an ad, that a new webcam has a ‘wide angel lens’. Its images must be heavenly.

Book Lover’s Day

August 9, 2020

Wayne writes: Happy National Book Lover’s Day! I didn’t know it was, either, until Easton Press mentioned it in an email this morning. To a book lover, isn’t every day Book Lover’s Day?

Speaking of books, apologies to anyone who has come to this blog thinking, from its title, that it has something to do with Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough. And welcome! We have nothing to do with The Donald, but much to do with books, so I thought that we should be saying more about what we’ve been reading – in this post, what I myself have been reading. I started to make a list of titles only at the end of May, after the library director at Williams asked staff, and others at the college, to say what we were reading at that moment, to be the subject of one of a series of Daily Messages emailed to the college community. I replied:

On my table is The Barbed-Wire University by Midge Gillies (2011), about how Allied prisoners-of-war in WW2 kept themselves occupied (other than by escaping). Officers, at least, who generally weren’t required to work, and at least those in Europe rather than Asia, had plenty of time not only to read but also to hear lectures and take courses. It’s not why I’m reading it – I’ve had this book for a while – but POW experiences of confinement, uncertainty, and fear uncomfortably parallel current circumstances. Two books read immediately before this were Humphrey Stone’s 2019 biography of his father, wood-engraver Reynolds Stone, and Tessa Wild’s 2018 William Morris and His Palace of Art: Architecture, Interiors and Design at Red House.

Here, with little further comment, are other books I’ve read since May, more or less in the order I read them:

The Art of Darkness: Staging the Philip Pullman Trilogy by Robert Butler. Oberon Books, 2003. On the Royal National Theatre adaptation of His Dark Materials. I wish I could have seen it.

Restoration Stories: Patina and Paint in Old London Houses by Philippa Stockley. Photographs by Charles Hopkinson. Pimpernel Press, 2019.

Laurits Andersen Ring. National Gallery of Denmark, 2019. Christina and I saw an exhibition of his work at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, just before the shutdown in March.

Louis I. Kahn and the Yale Center for British Art: A Conservation Plan by Peter Kinskip and Stephen Gee, in association with Constance Clement. Yale Center for British Art/Yale University Press, 2011.

John Piper’s Brighton Aquatints. Mainstone Press, 2019.

Winifred Knights, 1899–1947 by Sacha Llewellyn. Dulwich Picture Gallery/Lund Humphries, 2016.

Creating the V&A: Victoria and Albert’s Museum (1851–1861). Lund Humphries/V&A Publishing, 2019.

The Rise of Everyday Design: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and America. Edited by Monica Penick and Christopher Long. Harry Ransom Center/Yale University Press, 2019.

Oxford: Mapping the City by Daniel MacCannell. Birlinn, 2016.

Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings by Christina Hardyment. Bodleian Library, 2020. One of the fictional dwellings discussed is Bag End from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch. Gollancz, 2020. The latest book in the ‘Rivers of London’ supernatural mystery series.

Elementary, She Read by Vicki Delany. Crooked Lane Books, 2017. The first in the ‘Sherlock Holmes Bookshop Mystery’ series, but the last I’ll bother with, as I found the lead character unsympathetic. In general I’m a sucker for Holmes spin-offs (see below).

The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth by John Garth. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. Edited by Diana Donald and Jane Munro. Fitzwilliam Museum/Yale Center for British Art/Yale University Press, 2009.

American Dialogue: The Founders and Us by Joseph J. Ellis. Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison. Tor Books, 2020. Holmes and Watson, as ‘Crow’ and ‘Doyle’, in an alternate-universe England in which angels, vampires, werewolves, hell hounds, ghosts, etc. co-exist with ordinary people. The reader needs to know something of the Holmes Canon to appreciate what Addison has done with it. A bit of character development left me wondering What? How? for half the book, and the explanation, awkwardly left to the end, wasn’t satisfying (I mean, within the frame of the story; I didn’t think of Rex Stout’s notorious Holmesian ‘theory’ until afterward).

The Life and Art of Clifford Webb by Simon Brett. Little Toller Books, 2019.

And now I have to choose another book! What are you reading on Book Lover’s Day?

Baker, Baker

July 24, 2020

Wayne writes: This summer, library staff at Williams College are trying their hand at making recipes from the Chapin Library’s historic cookbook collection: among others, marrow spinage (spinach) pasties from 1671, pound cake from 1830, donuts from 1952 (from an Eskimo cookbook, substituting vegetable shortening for seal blubber). I chose to make a potato flour cake from the first edition (1901) of the Settlement Cook Book. Elizabeth Black Kander wrote this slim volume for people served by the Settlement House in Milwaukee, many of them poor, mainly Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. The book became widely popular, and new editions appeared well into the twentieth century. I bought a copy of the 1944 edition long ago at a public library sale.

The recipe for potato flour cake has only a few ingredients:

9 eggs
1-3/4 cups sugar
scant cup of potato flour (a flour made from dried potatoes, gluten-free)
half a lemon (rind and juice)

Separate the whites and yolks of seven of the eggs. Beat these whites very stiff. Beat well the seven yolks together with two whole eggs, then add the sugar, lemon rind, and juice; beat this mixture thoroughly, add the potato flour, and beat again. Now fold in the beaten egg whites and bake at 350° F in a preheated oven for 40 to 50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the cake comes out clean. Let cool in the pan before removing the cake to a large plate.

Given the age of the recipe, I had a number of questions. How big were the eggs? In 1901, they were probably smaller than our Large eggs, which are now the standard size. (I remember when supermarkets carried Medium eggs, but haven’t seen them in a long while.) The U.S. government didn’t start to grade eggs by size until 1943. Then, what kind of pan to use? The recipe doesn’t say. Not knowing how high the cake would rise, I decided to use a 9-inch springform pan and to grease it with butter. How hot should the oven be? The recipe calls for baking ‘slowly in a moderate oven’; well, a ‘moderately slow oven’ is said to be 300–350° F, and a ‘moderate oven’ 350–375, so I split the difference at 350 (around 180° C, Gas Mark 4), which was right. Forty minutes was quite enough for baking; any longer and the bottom might have burned.

Local supermarkets had no potato flour, so I had to order a pound from the King Arthur website. The finished product is dense and sweet, though not as sweet as I expected with one and three-quarters cups of sugar. The lemon rind (removed using a Microplane grater) and lemon juice offset the sugar and added a distinct but not overpowering flavor. If I were to make this again, however, I would reduce the sugar by a quarter cup. The cake is good for dessert or breakfast, and best in small slices.

The batter is very stiff. If you use a whisk to mix it, after beating the egg yolks and whole eggs don’t leave the whisk sitting in the batter, or you’ll find it hard to remove! Presumably, the addition of beaten egg whites (which I whisked, not all that successfully, in a KitchenAid stand mixer) is meant to lighten the cake, but the batter is so heavy that one could not possibly fold the egg whites in ‘very carefully’ as the cookbook states (to keep as much air in them as possible). I had to mix them in as best I could.

This morning, I saw a recipe in the New York Times for ‘Roman Breakfast Cake’, which is similar to the Settlement recipe except that it uses fewer eggs and all-purpose rather than potato flour, adds berries, and includes a little baking powder. This was shown baked in a ring pan.

A week ago, we had a banana gone too soft for slicing on cereal, and Christina wondered if I could make banana bread with just one banana. I searched for a recipe, and adapted a good one by Christina Lane at dessertfortwo.com, a site I’ll be looking at more closely. The result is actually more like a cake than a bread. I added the vanilla and spice.

1 over-ripe banana
3 tbsp. unsalted butter at room temperature
3 tbsp. granulated sugar
2 tbsp. honey
1 large egg yolk
dash of vanilla extract
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tbsp. wheat germ (optional, but I used it)
1/4 + 1/8 tsp. baking soda
dash of apple pie spice (or equivalent: cinnamon, cloves, etc.)
pinch of salt
2 tbsp. chopped nuts (optional; I used walnuts and pecans)

Preheat the oven to 350° F (180° C, Gas Mark 4). Grease a mini-loaf pan well with butter. (A mini-loaf pan is roughly 6 × 3 × 2 in.; mine is an Ekco 3-1/4.) Mash the banana with a fork; add the butter, sugar, and honey, stir well. Stir in the egg yolk and vanilla. Sprinkle over the flour, wheat germ, baking soda, spice, and salt. Stir in the chopped nuts. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the bread comes out clean. Let cool in the pan before removing the bread to a wire rack.

The only food I bake on a regular basis is granola. I much prefer my own simple (some would say dull) recipe to anything commercial in a box. This consists of:

6 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (I use Quaker)
1 cup wheat germ
small handful of sliced almonds
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil (I use canola)
1/2 cup honey

Mix the oats, wheat germ, and almonds in a large bowl. Combine the water, oil, and honey in a large measuring cup, add the liquid mixture to the dry ingredients. Spread the granola on a large rimmed baking sheet, such as a jelly roll pan, either greased or (much easier for cleaning) with a sheet of parchment paper more or less to fit. Bake for around 40 minutes at 325° F (around 160° C, Gas Mark 3), until golden brown.

Coronavirus Forever

July 19, 2020

Well, it seems like forever, doesn’t it? More than six months since the first word of the coronavirus, four since schools and businesses shut down, and who knows how long before things return to normal – whatever ‘normal’ may mean down the road. Williams College has invited students back to campus this fall, and most have said they intend to be here; how it will work out in practice remains to be seen. Covid testing will be done twice a week to begin with, results to be returned within forty-eight hours. Wayne’s library will be open (eventually) by appointment only, and with restrictions, and only to faculty, staff, and students, at least in these early stages. Wayne will be working from home as much as possible, as he has been since mid-March, going in only when needed and for a course on the great astronomers he’s co-teaching this fall. Many of the classes here will be held remotely even if the students are on campus; all classes will be remote once campus closes down early at Thanksgiving break, and there will be no January term in 2021.

Usually on July 4th Wayne is at the library for its Independence Day celebration, featuring an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, the text of which is read by actors from the Williamstown Theatre Festival. That wasn’t possible this year due to the pandemic, so a virtual reading was assembled using Williams faculty, staff, and family members as Declaration readers. Wayne introduced the programme, mixed the video and audio, and created video commentary.* The result can be seen on the Williams online digital repository or on Vimeo.

We’ve been to garden centres a few times (masked). The plants available now, this late in the season, are mostly past their best, though the other day we picked up cheap some nice hosta and heuchera for the back (shade) garden. Wayne continues to shop for groceries alone. We’ve kept our stocks up as shortages come and go. At present, at least at the closest store, one can’t find graham crackers or tinned pears, or leaf lettuce, fresh green beans, or frozen peas, and there were no strawberries to be had yesterday though they were advertised as on sale. We (mainly Christina) spent some idle hours the other day putting together a diabolically cut vintage wooden jigsaw puzzle, reproducing one of Pauline Baynes’s medieval-themed pictures, The Betrothal, based on a poster she made for Macmillan in 1952.

Travel of course is out of the question. Williams has ruled out business travel until at least the end of December – not that this will matter, as the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair, which we’ve been attending every autumn, will be only a virtual event this year – and has asked employees to be careful about personal travel, after which one would need to self-quarantine. Meanwhile, the American Automobile Association would like Wayne to become a member, British Airways have extended our Bronze frequent flyer memberships, and we receive emails from our favourite hotels and restaurants in England announcing their re-openings. We wonder if we’ll see London or Oxford ever again, with the USA a hotspot for the virus and travellers from here personae non gratae, in addition to all the closings and restrictions.

Wayne also receives frequent emails from clothiers such as Brooks Brothers, Paul Stuart, and Ben Silver, for all the good it does. Brooks Brothers seem to have been the first major menswear house to sell their own brand of cloth masks, but Ben Silver have made an ingenious combination mask and pocket square. In most of these advertisements, the coronavirus doesn’t exist: the models are happy, maskless of course, and dressed much better than most of us are these days, with nowhere nice or special to go. At least the lockdown has reduced wear and tear on Wayne’s better clothes and shoes, which he wears to work, and he has saved a lot by not being tempted to buy anything new – which is not, specifically, why Brooks Brothers recently declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, though it’s part of the problem.

Our garden, at least, is flourishing, even in an official drought here in Massachusetts and temperatures too high for us to go out for long. A few photos are included here. All three of our apple trees (Cortland, Fuji, and Honeycrisp) are bearing fruit, Christina’s flowers are taller and more abundant than ever (with a few exceptions), and two Early Girl tomato plants, which Wayne planted in pots, are doing very well. Even our one indoor plant, a cyclamen, is happy. We thought that this had come to its end, as supermarket cyclamens tend to do before long, but we decided to see what would happen if we moved it into a larger pot and used a trick found on YouTube, by which the plant is watered with a mixture of H2O plus a little 3% solution of hydrogen peroxide. This adds oxygen to the soil and helps the flow of nutrients. Magic! at least for our cyclamen, which now doesn’t know when to quit growing new leaves and flowers.

* Wayne writes, for anyone interested in the tech: Ideally, I would have recorded myself at the library in front of the actual documents, rather than in my home office, but that too wasn’t possible. I’m looking off to the side most of the time rather than into the camera to reduce glare on my glasses from the monitor and a key light off to my right, and from a tablet in front of me running a teleprompter app. I made my commentary with a Logitech C920 webcam, a lavalier microphone, and Debut software. The other readers (except Michael from the Theatre Festival) recorded their voices with iPhones; I equalized these in Audacity (and used that to record my own part of the Declaration), and converted the files in VLC media player to mp3. I made the title slides in InDesign, saved as jpegs, and mixed everything together in Shotcut.

Lord of the Rings Comparison 4

July 17, 2020

Two new boxed sets of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the latter in three volumes, were published this year by HarperCollins, London. The earliest issued of these sets, in B format (trade) paperback, is in a lightweight paper slipcase. The cover and slipcase art is photographic, with each illustration made from combined and modified stock photos. The Fellowship of the Ring includes Douglas A. Anderson’s ‘Note on the Text’ and our ‘Note on the 50th Anniversary Edition’. Our revised index is in The Return of the King. Maps are printed in sections on text pages, except for the Shire map which is printed as usual on its own page.

HarperCollins have also published a set of the four volumes in hardback, with dust-jackets, in a stiff board slipcase, with illustrations and cover art by Alan Lee. It’s what one might call a semi-de luxe edition, with titling, running heads, page numbers, and the Ring inscription in Book I, Chapter 2 printed in red. This edition omits both notes on the text, the first to do so since the 50th anniversary of The Lord of the Rings in 2004, but includes our revised index. The two larger maps are printed as endpapers, the Shire map as usual.

In our Comparison 2 we documented four typesettings of The Lord of the Rings from 2004 to 2014: eleven of configuration A (from the original 50th anniversary edition), four of B (primarily a mass-market, A format paperback), one of C (a Houghton Mifflin trade paperback), and one of D (the de luxe HarperCollins volume in a plastic slipcase). The two new editions of 2020 share yet another typesetting altogether: we will call the paperback and hardback respectively E1 and E2.

Compared against known errors in other copies and printings, E1 and E2 seem to be currently the most accurate texts. They incorporate all of the corrections noted in our Comparison 3 in June 2016. At least one error remains, however: ‘Dear Frodo,’ at the beginning of Gandalf’s letter received by Frodo at Bree, is still indented. Given that E is a new typesetting, it may be that new printing errors were introduced; but at present we do not know of any.

Update, July 18: In comments to this post, Douglas Bailey points out another known error uncorrected in the new editions: in Book V, Chapter 1, p. 756 of the 50th anniversary edition (our setting A), the sentence ‘“I am,” said Pippin’ should be run on with Gandalf’s dialogue in the preceding paragraph. This is explained in our online addenda and corrigenda to The Lord of the Rings. There we also identify additions and corrections to the index, which were not taken up when the references were changed to suit the new pagination. Douglas comments as well that the two endpaper maps of Middle-earth are not consistent which each other in detail; we noted this to be true of other editions in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, p. lxvii.

Tolkien Notes 18

July 15, 2020

Well Known?

The Spring number of the journal The Book Collector refers (p. 135) to a ‘well known’ story ‘about Tolkien being advised by a friend to whom he showed his first manuscript to stick to teaching Anglo-Saxon’. Well known to whom? Not to us. And what was the ‘first manuscript’?

The same number, and same page, tells a story about Anthony Price, who as a young reporter on the Oxford Mail was asked to review The Fellowship of the Ring. His editor thought that the book looked ‘a bit dull’ and was worth only 400 words maximum. Price ‘disagreed and arranged an interview with Tolkien, who thereupon handed over proofs for the next two volumes, with handwritten annotations’. Price asked if he could write a feature article on Tolkien for the Mail; no, replied his editor, because Tolkien had written ‘a very odd book’, and the editor had talked with ‘some dons about Tolkien – they say he’s a real weirdo. But do the 400.’ Price’s review of The Fellowship of the Ring was published on 16 September 1954, as ‘Fairy Story for Grownups Too’; its length, however, is closer to 800 words than to 400. We know that Price spoke with Tolkien in September 1954, as Tolkien mentions it in a letter, but his interview was not published until 27 January 1956, and in the Oxford Times rather than the Mail. In the meantime, Price also reviewed for the Mail, in January and October 1955, The Two Towers (comparatively briefly) and The Return of the King.

Addenda and Corrigenda Updates

After a very long gap of time – nearly two years! – we have made new updates to many of the pages on our website listing addenda and corrigenda to our several books. These are:

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014)

The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (2011)

J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator (1995)

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017)

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017): I · Chronology

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017): I · Chronology by date

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017): II–III · Reader’s Guide

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017): II–III · Reader’s Guide by date

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (2017): Supplemental Bibliography

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (2014)

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (2014) by date

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (2014): Supplemental Bibliography

Roverandom (1998)

Life in the Time of Coronavirus

March 21, 2020

It has been some months since we posted to our blog. This has been due to work (and general laziness), not to COVID-19. We wanted our readers to know that we’re safe and sound, at least so far.

Williams College sent its students away for spring break a week early. They are to take their classes online until the end of Spring Term. Faculty now have only a short time to revamp their syllabi and change their teaching methods to suit the new reality of ‘social distancing’, and librarians like Wayne are similarly having to adapt. Like most of the Williams staff, Wayne has been working from home since last Wednesday. Since he can no longer provide rare books and manuscripts to students and faculty in person, he’s filling the hours checking catalog records, revising bibliographical descriptions, planning summer exhibitions – hoping that the exhibition galleries will re-open by summer – and meeting colleagues online. He’s also standing by to scan or photograph materials, though this falls short of experiencing the immediacy of original objects.

Since we’re both of an age, and since Christina has an artificial heart valve, we’re being especially careful about exposure. At the beginning of March, we went to New York City for the antiquarian book fair, one of the two big buying trips Wayne does as Chapin Librarian every year. Concerns about the virus were then only just becoming urgent, with elbow bumps beginning to replace handshakes. The fair was less crowded than usual, though in density of people far in excess of the levels now recommended. Of course, fewer buyers meant less competition, and Wayne did well in the five hours we allowed. Since it was Christina’s birthday, we bought for our home library something she had wanted for many years, the two-volume set of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (1910–11) illustrated by Arthur Rackham. We couldn’t find one of the deluxe copies bound in white vellum, but spotted a first printing of the trade edition, itself somewhat deluxe, in very good condition and with its rare original dust-jackets.

Earlier this week, we learned that at least one of the dealers at the fair later tested positive for the coronavirus, and a few others were assumed to be infected. None of these was among those we visited, and most of those Wayne spoke with the longest have told him they’re doing fine. We ourselves have now passed the fourteen-day mark since the fair, without symptoms. We’re staying in as much as possible; each of our dentists and Christina’s hairdresser cancelled appointments as they too distance socially (to adapt the phrase), and we expect that other events in our diaries will have to be rescheduled also. For the time being, Wayne is making the weekly supermarket run solo, for perishables and prescriptions, to spare Christina the effort. Wayne having read about the fragility of supply chains, we had begun to build up a stock of non-perishables and other supplies even before our New York trip, and that has proved to be a good thing as our local supermarket now has many empty shelves and bins which are not being restocked very quickly.

A booklist from Sotheran’s, the London dealer, received about a week ago included an amusing note:

The nightmare of self-isolation – fourteen days at home, unable to leave the house, and nothing left on Netflix. And then you turn to the beautiful prints you bought that brighten up the walls, and the lovely books that stir your imagination and fill up the hours to the brim. Actually, is two weeks long enough?

Two weeks wouldn’t make much of a dent in the books we want to read and already have, let alone those yet to come, or the music we want to listen to, or videos to watch (we don’t do streaming, but have many DVDs). So fourteen days would not be a hardship – or fourteen months, for that matter. Christina, being retired, spends most of her time at home anyway; through the winter she has kept busy continuing to index our collection of Tolkien-related cuttings, letters, and ephemera. With spring having arrived, she’s looking ahead to work in the garden once the local nurseries re-open (we hope) starting April 1st. When not at the library, Wayne is still picking away at our long-expected book on Pauline Baynes. Together we wrote a brief obituary of Christopher Tolkien for the newsletter of the Children’s Books History Society, and are preparing a longer appreciation of Christopher for the next number of Tolkien Studies.

Stay well!

Tolkien Collection Quantified – Comments

July 31, 2019

Quite a few of you looked at our latest post. Thanks, and apologies for the length of time between that post and the one before that. We’ve had some comments, both direct to our blog and on the Tolkien Society’s Facebook page.

Clive Shergold asked, presumably with tongue in cheek (though one never knows), what our figure in linear feet translates to in hobbit ells. First, define an ell, hobbit or otherwise! Then do the math. We measured in linear feet because that’s what librarians do on this side of the pond (though they express book heights in centimetres), and because American shelving tends to be sold in feet, typically three feet to a shelf (though with a lot of variation by manufacturer).

Juan Manuel Grijalvo thought that quantifying our Tolkien collection suggested that we don’t have a catalogue or inventory of it. We do have a catalogue, or rather catalogues, or lists, as one may like to call them. One is only of books and other materials (such as audio recordings) by Tolkien. Another comprises all other books in our library, including works on Tolkien, as well as everything ‘non-Tolkien’. These are kept in electronic form and updated as needed. But Christina has also been making shelflists – more detailed lists of books as we have them on our shelves, so that we can find an item more precisely if we want it. Our booklists, and lists of CDs, DVDs, etc., and other lists as well, travel with us on our laptop and tablets, so that we can refer to them and prevent buying something all over again that we forgot we had. We used to print lists out and carry them into book and record shops, but that became unwieldy, and of course electronic lists can be more easily searched.

Drew Foster would like us to do a video tour of our house. Drew, it’s hard enough to get good still photos of our books, etc., but rest assured that we’re not living among stacks of books in the middle of the floor or piled high against the windows. We’re collectors, not hoarders, and as librarians (one still active, one retired) we like and appreciate order. We even have (some) wall space on which to hang pictures!

Naturesfocus asked if we also have a fair amount of digital material in our collection. We have downloaded selectively (and legally), including some materials ‘born digital’, but our focus is on physical resources.

Note to anyone still planning to buy a copy of the new (2017) edition of our J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, this is currently on sale from Amazon U.K. for only 61.89 (plus shipping), which we think is the lowest the online price has ever been, a 48% discount.

Tolkien Collection Quantified

July 26, 2019

Every so often, we become curious about how many books we have in our library. Not too many, no! But if asked, how many should we say (besides ‘a lot’)? Wayne once made an estimate, based on the total linear feet of our shelves multiplied by the average number of volumes per shelf, and came up with a figure close to 20,000 volumes – plus magazines, recordings, comic books, posters, etc. A few years later, he tried that again and got a number around 18,000 volumes; and since we haven’t weeded 2000 books in the meantime, it was clear that the final figure depended on how one came up with an average number per shelf. Some shelves, with thick books, are easier to count than those with children’s picture books or books of poetry, which tend to be slim.

Now Christina has given it a go, looking specifically at our Tolkien collection and measuring only linear feet of shelving. (If you, dear reader, would like to do the math, a good average number of volumes per linear foot would be 12. This would apply to categories 1–7 and 16. Items in the other categories are stored in boxes of various size.) At present, we have:

1. Books by Tolkien in English and primary publications in English, and including books and magazines by or with contributions by Tolkien, primary publications of letters, and artwork (Hammond bibliography sections A–E): 165 LF (linear feet; 1 foot = 0.3048 metres)

2. Books by Tolkien in translation (in 65 languages): 183 LF

3. Books about Tolkien in English: 44 LF

4. Books about Tolkien in other languages: 3 LF

5. Anthologies: 6 LF

6. Books on art inspired by Tolkien: 3 LF

7. Graphic novels and official film guides: 3 LF

8. Journals, fanzines, etc.: 60 LF

9. Media (tape, cassette, CD, DVD): 18 LF

10. Calendars: 3 LF

11. Posters: 24 LF

12. Jigsaws, games, ICE booklets etc.: 4 LF

13. Research papers related to Tolkien: 17 LF

14. Scrapbooks (miscellaneous cuttings)*: 8 LF

15. Storage boxes with hanging files†: 44 LF

16. Miscellaneous books‡: 26 LF

17. Miscellaneous other§: 28 LF

Altogether, this totals 640 linear feet – as of now.

Also of relevance, we have books illustrated by Pauline Baynes (30 LF), books on children’s literature and fantasy, many with Tolkien references (33 LF), and books on C.S. Lewis and the other Inklings (18 LF). A substantial general reference collection, including works such as the OED and Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, supports the whole.

At the rate books by Tolkien are reissued (we’re looking at you, Easton Press, whose edition of The Lost Road arrived today), or books about Tolkien, especially essay collections, are turned out, the figure will continue to increase. What is our limit of growth? We don’t know yet, but are bound to hit it someday.

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* These are scrapbooks compiled by Christina, mainly in England (until 1995) and her first few years in the U.S.A., in 237 books, each with 34 pages. Contents include copies of rare published material, interviews, photographs, obituaries, notes on associated places, miscellaneous biographical information, reviews including works by and about Tolkien, and adaptations. Articles are roughly sorted (bibliography, religion, sources, relevance, publishing, exploitation, inspired artwork, Tolkien Society, events, etc.), plus a multitude of minor mentions. Originally accessed by typewritten lists identifying the contents of each scrapbook and a manuscript list of publications from which the contents were taken (where relevant). The scrapbooks are now continued by hanging files, as below.

† Storage boxes with hanging files, containing material such as would have been pasted into scrapbooks, which piled up in the years we were writing The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion and The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (original editions), and our edition of The Lord of the Rings, as well as anything acquired to date. In 2007 Christina began the long task of sorting accumulated material into legal-size folders, and those into hanging files in (currently) 17 office storage boxes, listing each item with a brief summary and cross-referencing in lists of authors and publications. This work was completed early in 2016, and new material is incorporated periodically. About a quarter of the scrapbooks have been incorporated into the same database, currently up to and including reviews of works by Tolkien.

‡ That is, books on Oxford, Oxford University, Birmingham, Switzerland, George Allen & Unwin, and the First World War, books by Rayner Unwin, volumes from the series Oxford English Monographs, books which influenced Tolkien, Whitaker’s Almanack for 1941–3, diaries, postcard books, quiz books, spoofs, books of fiction with Tolkien as a character, minor mentions, English books about Tolkien (e.g. by Tom Shippey) translated into other languages, etc.

§ Plates (china) reproducing Ted Nasmith art, catalogues issued by Tolkien’s publishers, spare copies of books, old listings, book catalogues, Royal Mail publications, cards, postcards, miscellaneous cuttings, Bodleian Library ephemera, buttons, badges, etc.

Shown: Some of our books about Tolkien, in a sitting room corner. Shelves of books illustrated by Pauline Baynes are at left.