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.