John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 28

T. H. White / LIttle Golden Books

Here’s the oddest thing I’ve unearthed in a while, what must be one of the first books I ever owned. My guess is that I probably got it around the time I turned five, which also turns out to be about the time the film came out. I remember that the local supermarket in Monticello, Arkansas had a promotion where at check-out kids got a little plastic ring with a little sword in it you cd pull out and put back in and pull out and put back in and so forth.






This book is signed in what is clearly my mother's handwriting (this being before I learned how to read). 

The only book I think I’ve had longer is a battered copy of PICKLES THE FIRE CAT. This I loved so much that I kept the library copy checked out more or less permanently. I can still remember how every time it was due we took it down to the library, where I wd check it out again. Eventually my parents got me a copy of my own, which later passed down to my nieces and then later still back to me.  It's almost certainly my first book, but not necessarily the one I've had the longest.   
--John R.

Christopher's festschrift

So, last year I pre-ordered THE GREAT TALES NEVER END: ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN, edited by Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine and published by the Bodleian (which holds thousand of pages of Tolkien manuscripts edited by C. T. and then deposited in the Library). It's a book I've been v. much looking forward to but I hadn't known the exact release date. So yesterday I did the obvious thing: dropped the Bodley giftshop* a note asking the release date.

And, with admirable promptness, today I have my answer: my copy shd ship to me on June 24th, or the end of next week.  I know it'll take a while to get here, across an ocean and a continent, but it's nice to know that the release date is so near.

For those who have heard about this one but not any details, the names of the contributors shd be enough to show that this volume shd be of interest to just about anyone interested in Tolkien studies: Priscilla Tolkien, Verlyn Flieger, Wayne G. Hammond, Christina Scull, Tom Shippey, John Garth, Carl Hostetter, Stuart Lee, Brian Sibley, Vincent Ferre, and Maxime Pascal.

Having been waiting for this one for so long, I'm really looking forward to its arrival.

--John R.

*For the book for Christopher, see

https://bodleianshop.co.uk/collections/j-r-r-tolkien/products/great-tales-never-end

Note that the Bodley Shop also has an array of interesting Tolkien themed items, which can be viewed HERE:

https://bodleianshop.co.uk/collections/j-r-r-tolkien

Jasper

So, we bought a new car. 

The old car had served us well -- we got it around the time I started this blog (its arrival being announced in one of my earliest posts herein). Being responsible car owners we've re-homed it to a new owner who shd get the good out of it.

I've given up driving, mainly because of the eyes, but Janice drove me over to a nearby park-and-ride (deserted on a Sunday) where I cd get behind the wheel and putter around a bit to get a sense of how it feels. Think this will be a good car for us for a long time to come.

As for Jasper, I was trying to think of a name. Given that it's color is a kind of metallic yellowy green I'd been inclined for Verne when Janice pointed out that this color was officially 'jasper'. So, for the time being at least, Jasper it is.

--John R.

P.S. Thanks to Janice for the picture.

 current reading: Heinlein's TUNNEL IN THE SKY

Lost Tales and The Lost Road

 So, yesterday wrapped up the fourth and final session in Verlyn Flieger's online class 

The Silmarillion: Tolkien's Unfinished Symphony, streamed through the Politics and Prose bookstore in DC.*  I'm glad I signed up, both for the presentation and discussion.

I particularly enjoyed the last session, dedicated to the Akallabeth, Lost Road, and Notion Club Papers, since I've long had a special interest in Tolkien's Atlantis myth. 

Although I'd read (and written about) this material before, the presentation was thought-provoking and the contributions from the students interesting. 

In short: a good course. I'd do this again.

--John R.

current reading: letters of T. H. White (somewhat off-putting). re-reading Heinlein's FIFTH COLUMN (just finished**) and TUNNEL IN THE SKY (just started).

*  https://www.politics-prose.com/class/online-class-silmarillion-jrr-tolkiens-unfinished-symphony-2253

**problematic,  like most of Heinlein. 

$800,000,000

 So, thanks to Janice for the link to this story that shows just how amazingly popular, and profitable, our hobby has become.  

It turns out that Wizards of the Coast, which includes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, is the most profitable part of Hasbro. As in, it brought in eight hundred million ($800,000,000) last year. So much money, in fact, that it's attracting serious investors who'd like to see the ccg/rpg spun off as its own company.

This extreme profitability is all the more believable in that it might explain something that's puzzled me for years. Hasbro has a history of buying highly profitable companies, hollowing them out, and then shutting them down. It looked like they were about to do that to TSR/WotC in 2002, then they seemed to have changed plans and not followed through.  Now I wonder if that had indeed been the plan, but they'd had to call it off once they realized that D&D was, in the words of a TSR vice president back in Lake Geneva days, "a license to print money".  So much so that it's now being picked up to be used on NPR in a segment explaining proxy battles.

And we find we live in a world in which D&D and MtG sales are creeping up in a way that makes me wonder if it'll hit the billion dollar mark.

Have to keep an eye out to see if there's a follow-up piece after the actual shareholders meeting, schedules for June 8th.

Here's the link.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/31/110229...

--John R.

--current reading: still T. H. White

$800,000

 So, thanks to Janice for the link to this story that shows just how amazingly popular, and profitable, our hobby has become.  

It turns out that Wizards of the Coast, which includes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, is the most profitable part of Hasbro. As in, it brought in eight hundred million ($800,000) last year. So much money, in fact, that it's attracting serious investors who'd like to see the ccg/rpg spun off as its own company.

This extreme profitability is all the more believable in that it might explain something that's puzzled me for years. Hasbro has a history of buying highly profitable companies, hollowing them out, and then shutting them down. It looked like they were about to do that to TSR/WotC in 2002, then they seemed to have changed plans and not followed through.  Now I wonder if that had indeed been the plan, but they'd had to call it off once they realized that D&D was, in the words of a TSR vice president back in Lake Geneva days, "a license to print money".  So much so that it's now being picked up to be used on NPR in a segment explaining proxy battles.

And we find we live in a world in which D&D and MtG sales are creeping up in a way that makes me wonder if it'll hit the billion dollar mark.

Have to keep an eye out to see if there's a follow-up piece after the actual shareholders meeting, schedules for June 8th.

Here's the link.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/31/110229...

--John R.

--current reading: still T. H. White

Off Deadline

So, Saturday I finished up a big project that I'd been working on off and on for some time now.

Monday I got the file off to the publisher. It ran to 174 pages, or some 84,000 words -- a fairly substantial volume.

Now to write a mini-bio -- the inevitable accompaniment to any turnover -- and wait to hear back from the publisher. 

In the meantime, I've started the next project, which is much more limited in scope; I expect it to run about 5,000 words and I have about three months to get the work done in. I take it as a good sign that I had no trouble finding the notes and synopsis for this one, right where I put them aside when I sketched out the piece last September.

Also good to learn that some eye trouble doesn't appear to have any major effect my ability to type or read.

More to come as the project makes its way through the printing process.

--John R.

current reading: A NIGHT IN THE LONESOME OCTOBER by Roger Zelazny.

temporarily abandoned book: LETTERS TO A FRIEND by T. H. White (1982)

The new DARK TOWER

So, last night my friends at the Monday night D&D game shared the news that the new edition of DARK TOWER by Janell Jaquays is now up as a Kickstarter. I'm a big fan of this gem from the legendary Judges Guild --it was actually the first D&D module I bought, and I still have my original copy.

Looks like I'm not the only one who admires this classic. According to the Kickstarter site, with twenty-seven days out the goal of $10,000 has been blown past. The amount pledged is now $318,959 from two thousand, four hundred and thirty-three different people.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/devillich/original-adventures-reincarnated-7-the-dark-tower

On a personal note, I was happy to see my name atop the list of people who contributed essays praising the adventure: Mine was a short piece setting the adventure within the context of those far-off days.

What's in the Book?

Volume one of the three-volume slipcase contains a reprint of the original Dark Tower adventure from 1979, plus introductory essays by John Rateliff, Eric Mona, Justin Alexander, James Maliszewski, Jon Taco Hershberger, Stephen NEwton, and others"

So, glad to see Goodman Games is carrying on their mission to celebrate the old days by making the classics available again, in their original form but also updated or the current rules stystem.

--John R

--

Unwin and Tolkien agree

 So, there's the famous episode where JRRT, a year after THE  HOBBIT was published, angrily repudiated Germany's anti-Semitic laws -- specifically by refusing to make an official statement declaring that he was not Jewish, such a statement being required by his prospective publisher for a German edition, which wd have been the first translation into another language (See LETTERS OF JRRT, page 37, letter of 25 July 1938 for details).

I thought I remembered a different incident in which Unwin made his own opposition to anti-Semitic madness clear. It's years ago now since I read Stanley Unwin's autobiography, THE TRUTH ABOUT A PUBLISHER--the title is a play on Unwin's famous polemic about the publishing business, THE TRUTH ABOUT PUBLISHING--and I couldn't find a specific passage I was looking for. 

My memory said that in his autobiography Unwin told the story about foiling Nazi anti-Semitic laws, which forbid anyone  of Jewish ancestry from owning a business. To get around this, Unwin bought three or four German publishers for a token price (say, a pound) . Then at the end of the war he returned them to their original owners for the same token price.

Does anyone out there remember this episode? Am I looking in the wrong place for it (i.e., is it in David or Philip Unwin's autobiography instead)?

Although I wasn't successful in finding the anecdote I wanted, I did find a different passage that shows Unwin, to his credit, as having taken an anti-Nazi stance early on (1933), as opposed to others (like Roy Campbell, who was enthusiastically pro-Hitler at that point). Here's the passage:

It was . . . an interesting indication of the mounting

 indignation at the Nazi treatment of the Jews when,

 in April 1933, I received a discreetly worded letter

 from my good friend Dr Gustav Kilpper, the 

representative of Germany on the Executive, that,

 although it might easily be misconstrued if the

 suggestion came from Germany, they felt that, 

in view of the tension in the atmosphere, it would

be wise to postpone the Brussels Congress to 1934

 . . . It proved, however, too late to do so.

At the Brussels Congress Dr. Kilpper went much 

further than such an enlightened man had any 

justification in doing in defending the Nazis,

 who showed their appreciation by turning him

out of office. Following the Congress he 

urged my son and myself to join him on a

holiday on the Eibsee, which under other 

circumstances we would gladly have done.

 My reply read as follows:

'I very much appreciate your letter of the 11th 

July with its kind invitation. But the news that

 reaches me this morning of the glorification

 of the murderers of my friend Rathenau --

one of the most enlightened and noble-

minded men I have ever met -- makes

 it more than ever clear that Germany 

under the present regime is no place

 for me. That an assassin could be 

regarded in 1933 as a hero is incredible. 

What  are we coming to?

[THE TRUTH ABOUT A PUBLISHER, 1960, p.401-402]

The context of this, for those like me who know less about the Weimar republic than Wikipedia does, is something like this: Unwin, who was the leading British expert on international publishing issues, had played a large role in the revival of the International Publishers' Congress, which had lapsed in 1920 just after the end of The Great War. It held biannual meetings with a rotating host city (starting with Paris 1931).  

Rathenau is Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, the only Jewish member of the Republic, who was assassinated in 1922 by a reactionary anti-Semitic group, the Organisation Consul. The assassins were hunted down: some died in a police shoot-out, others went to prison, and some evaded punishment, so far as I can tell. Following national mourning, a number of monuments were put up in his honor.  Then when the Nazis came to power they knocked down the monuments in Rathenau's honor and replaced them with monuments celebrating his murderers. That's the outrage that had Unwin so worked up.

--John R.

current reading: Thorne Smith's SKIN & BONES -- a minor late work comprised almost entirely in dialogue.

Tolkien Influencers -- a list

 So, thanks to J.E. at  Tolkien Collector's Guide for this link to a post that not only lists twenty-five Influencers but also what each thought about the footage they were shown and their impressions of the Showrunners.

https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/...

There's a lot of interest here, but it'll take a while to absorb. I am glad to see the event organizers brought in a few voices from Latin America. 

--John R.