Fork

I am still 6 feet, one and one half inch­es tall, I am 167 pounds, my heart­beat is 71 bpm and my blood pres­sure is 133/81. I also vot­ed today and am dis­ap­point­ed that I did not receive a stick­er.

I’ve read dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Lord of the Rings innu­mer­able times. But I recent­ly got my hands on the most recent reis­su­ing of the author­i­ta­tive British ver­sion of the book. It con­tains a Note on the Sec­ond Edi­tion that explains the intri­ca­cies of pub­lish­ing that the book has gone through. Appar­ent­ly, the US ver­sion has been based on the orig­i­nal Houghton Mif­flin pho­to-off­set from the six­ties. Well, Pro­fes­sor Tolkien did quite a bit of revi­sion, rewrote the for­ward and cleaned up plen­ty of incon­sis­ten­cies. I’ve only read the for­ward, the pro­logue and the first chap­ter but the dif­fer­ences [at least to me] are remark­able.

Most­ly in the for­ward. Tolkien want­ed to rewrite it because his orig­i­nal for­ward con­fused the ‘machin­ery of the tale’ with the ‘author’s intent’ too much for his taste. The new for­ward gave me a cou­ple of new insights into the kind of life that Tolkien had in regard to the celebri­ty and crit­i­cism of his books. I’m real­ly dig­ging it. The new ver­sion is a pho­to-off­set of the Allen and Unwin ver­sion and con­tains British spelling con­ven­tions and seems brand new to me all over again.

5 thoughts on “Fork”

  1. a tall, semi-dark, hand­some man who digs LOR…

    whip­ping out my crys­tal ball, i see in your future… a woman who will make you feel like sleep is option­al, even on your most exhaust­ed hal­loween nights. 😉

    (btw, since you not­ed my foot fetish, i felt respon­si­ble to check your blog out. nice wit you got there.)

  2. I take it this ver­sion isn’t avail­able on Ama­zon? As a fel­low Tolkien read­er, I’d be very inter­est­ed in a new ver­sion for my year­ly read of Lord of The Rings.

  3. i see in your future… a woman who will make you feel like sleep is option­al, even on your most exhaust­ed hal­loween nights.

    That will take some doing, but I’m will­ing to give it a shot. I should get me one of them there crys­tal balls.

    Jmay, I can’t find the ver­sion on Ama­zon amidst the morass of LotR cap­i­tal­iza­tion. It is the hard­bound ver­sion in three vol­umes and the dust­jack­ets are sort of creamish col­ored. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Pret­ty unas­sum­ing but very ser­vice­able.

  5. always be will­ing to take the shot, adam. life goes by way, way, way too fast to pass up shots at some­one inter­est­ing. it also helps to have a crys­tal ball. you’re wel­come to bor­row it.

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