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 The Tolkien Estate were eager to bring more of Tolkien’s unpublished poems into print, and Christopher Tolkien hoped that his father’s talent for poetry could become more widely known.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

Wayne writes: Not in any particular order, here are books I read during April and May (and an extra): The Dig by John Preston. Penguin Books, 2021 (first published 2007). A fictionalized account of the discovery and excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial treasure. ‘Certain changes have been made for dramatic effect’: indeed, yes. Preston is entertaining, but fortunately we have some good books on the actual events, which involved many more people and multiple dig seasons. Fearless by Allen Stroud. Flame Tree Press, 2020. This seemed from descriptions as if it might be a good science-fictio ..read more

Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages (Word on Fire Academic, 2021) is advertised as a ‘major corrective’ to the idea that ‘Tolkien was dismissive of modern culture, and that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are fundamentally medieval and nostalgic in their inspiration’ (to quote the jacket blurb). We were eager to read it, not least to see what Holly Ordway would make of an argument – that Tolkien distanced himself from modern (contemporary) literature – which was put to rest some time ago. See, for example, our article ‘Reading’ in The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion an ..read more

Wayne writes: Not in any particular order, here are books I read during February and March, heavier on fiction than usual: The Silence: A Novel by Don DeLillo. Scribner, 2020. I was attracted to this short novel (‘novel’ is much too generous to describe its length, even ‘novella’ would be excessive) which takes as its potentially interesting premise that digital technology has suddenly, inexplicably failed. Planes crash, computers don’t work, electronic communication is dead. What would people do without all of this, who have come to rely on it? Apparently they would not really know what to ..read more

An advertising email received this morning from Pottery Barn asks: What are some creative ways to utilize wall space? Our answer, for the most part: bookcases! This is also our answer to the question of utilizing floor space.   Wayne writes: Not in any particular order, here are books I read during January: Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham. Macfadden, 1967 printing (first published 1930). The first full Albert Campion mystery. Rather clumsy by today’s standards, and compared to some of the later Allinghams. Merton College Library: An Illustrated History by Julia C. Walworth. Bodleian L ..read more