On the eve of publication of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, we are to be interviewed by Kate Molleson on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Front Row’, via Zoom, later today. The programme begins at 7.15 pm London time (2.15 pm U.S. Eastern Time), and we’re told that our segment is to come just after 7.30 ..read more

An article about the forthcoming Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien was posted online today, in advance of print publication in the Observer tomorrow, Sunday 25 August. The Arts journalist Dalya Alberge interviewed us by phone and saw a PDF of our book. The Collected Poems is still on schedule to be published on 12 September ..read more

After too long a hiatus, we have updated many of our web pages on hammondandscull.com, providing further additions and corrections to our books. When we last posted addenda and corrigenda, in late December 2020, we had only begun to add information from Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (2018) by Catherine McIlwaine; now that we have completed our work on Tolkien’s Collected Poems, we have been able to absorb Maker more fully, and to deal as well with much of the small mountain of new Tolkien scholarship and new online resources that have appeared in recent years, and with addenda and corrigenda ..read more

Our editor has sent us the latest mock-ups of the U.K. (HarperCollins) and U.S. (William Morrow) editions of Tolkien’s Collected Poems, differing only in the imprint. Click on each picture to enlarge. After a similar image was posted on another site, we read a comment which suggested that the creamy paper shown within the ‘notch’ of the box might be an inserted booklet; this is in fact simply the front board of the third volume. Each of the three volumes features on its cover a fanciful ‘tree’ drawn by Tolkien, one of which may be seen on the side of the box ..read more

Our thanks to all who have written to us with congratulations and set a new record for views of this blog. News of the Collected Poems has caused not a little excitement. It has also led to not a few questions, chief among which has been: What will the book include? Will it have the complete Lay of the Fall of Gondolin? Will it have Tolkien’s verse translation of Beowulf? Will it have his rumoured bestiary poems about the Fox and the Unicorn? And especially (if very curiously), will it have The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf, which so far has been published only in German translation? We regret ..read more

HarperCollins having announced today that The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien will be published this September, we’re able to speak publicly about our next book for the first time since an edition of Tolkien’s verse was suggested to us in HarperCollins’ offices in April 2016. The Tolkien Estate were eager to bring more of Tolkien’s unpublished poems into print, and Christopher Tolkien hoped that his father’s talent for poetry could become more widely known. We were sympathetic to both aims, and no strangers to Tolkien’s poems through our earlier work. Our immediate task was to review scan ..read more

Wayne writes: With so many books to report more than two years after my last post about reading, it seems best to deal with no more than six months at a time, here the period from January to June 2022: On Carol. Katherine Small Gallery, 2020. ‘An introduction to Carol J. Blinn delivered by Michael Russem at the December 2014 meeting of The Society of Printers’. A slight but attractive pamphlet highlighting Easthampton, Massachusetts printer Carol Blinn’s (Warwick Press) jobbing work – business cards, invitations, etc. – which I’ve long admired alongside her decorative paste papers. I used to ..read more

Wayne writes: The ‘hail’ of our title is our way of saying ‘hello’ again to our readers, after more than two years of silence on this site, and especially to those who have recently subscribed to our blog despite more than two years of silence. The ‘farewell’, in turn, is my bidding good-bye to the job I held as a college rare books librarian for more than forty-five years, which I mentioned was in the cards in our post of 26 December 2021. I retired in February 2022, more than a year earlier than I had intended. I had planned to stay until summer 2023, to mark my 70th birthday and ‘my’ libr ..read more

Wayne writes: In no particular order, here are books I read during the past few months. It’s an embarrassingly small number, which I put down to: our having subscribed to the New Yorker, which has distracted from books (but is such a civilized magazine); my having taken up crossword puzzles; and my being occupied with things to do as I approach retirement from my library job after more than forty-five years. The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783 by Joseph J. Ellis. Liveright, 2021. I’ve enjoyed Ellis’s books on the Revolutionary period (e.g. The Quartet, the Pulit ..read more

This will be a shorter ‘Notes’ than usual, indeed very brief, as we’re pressed for time, with various appointments, landscape work on our property to do or be scheduled (we’ll have another post about our garden soon), car repairs, and so forth. But nothing Covid-related: we’re fully vaccinated, and life where we are, at least, has returned to mostly-maskless. Of course it’s less good in many other places, which is worrying. And there are still many restrictions on travelling. In Tolkien news, addenda and corrigenda for our books (mainly addenda) are accumulating, and we’ll have another group ..read more