The Big One

[supergee]

How The Lord of the Rings changed publishing forever. Might have said a bit more about how Terry Brooks & the del Reys discovered that you can create a template for infinitely replicable trilogy product by lopping off a few of the more interesting parts.

Thanx to Tor.com.

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Interesting and strange to read that American perspective. I was only dimly aware it even came out in paperback: my parents had the original hardback edition (yes, they had to wait between volumes), and I assume Tolkien at least okayed that cover with the Eye of Mordor, just as he created the cover for The Hobbit - and inside illustrations, too. I don't believe I'd ever seen those three paperback covers. And where's the mention of the impact of the Second World War? Tolkien denied quite emphatically that the trilogy was in any way allegorical, but it's undeniably there. I don't see it as escapist at all.

I just checked, and Gormenghast began publication well before The Lord of the Rings That's also fantasy, also an immersive world (and goes further with the use of illustrations). What it didn't do was revive the Quest as plot device :-)

Maybe I'm wrong, but didn't Penguin Books do the "paperbacks that don't fall apart and that include classics as well as thrillers" well before the US publishers? Post-war, however, in my experience the dynamics were very different on the two sides of the Atlantic because genre fiction (and for all I know the rest of fiction) was predominantly consumed via the library. I largely stopped reading SF after I came over here, so almost all the SF I read, I read in library copies, overwhelmingly the yellow Gollancz editions. This was probably changing among the affluent and under pressure of American marketing, but it meant I read a lot of older SF as well as someof the new 60s stuff. And I think it was a factor in the field not becoming so heavy on fantasy so quickly in the UK as in the US, where there was more of a publisher-mediated bandwagon effect.

So anyway ... different worlds :-)