In 1964 I was fortunate enough to be awarded an American Field Service Scholarship. I spent a year with a family in the town of Redwood Falls in Minnesota, graduated High School and at the end of the year went on a month-long bus trip around the eastern states of the US, ending up in Washington DC.
The Minnesota experience was an interesting one. Redwood Falls was a small town – much smaller than the Auckland whence I came – and making an adjustment to an environment where pretty much knew everyone else was interesting.
1964 was an election year. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat, had succeeded to the Presidency following the assassination of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963. Johnson selected Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesotan, as his Vice Presidial running mate. The Republican candidate was Barry Goldwater and according to some commentators, 1964 was the year that the Republicans began the swing to the Right.
On election night, as may be expected, Minnesota came out for Johnson/Humphrey although the votes counted in the Redwood Falls area favoured Goldwater – the only area in the State to do so.
For a first time visitor to Minnesota, experiencing a Minnesota winter is special. The snow began to fall in November and did not let up until March. We experienced a couple of blizzards that involved digging through the snow which was up to roof level. And it was cold – so cold that it is really indescribable and really has to be experienced to understand what level it reaches.
Redwood Falls was blessed with an excellent library housed in a lovely stone building and as I recall it was funded by the Carnegie programme. The library is no longer in that building which is a shame but I imagine it outgrew the premises. The library had an excellent selection of books and many happy hours were spent browsing there. In addition the library had excellent indices to periodicals which were very useful for researching topics. The school, and especially our English teacher, encouraged research and I found that hunting for information was at least as interesting as the information sought itself.
I missed bookshops. Minneapolis-St Paul – the famed Twin Cities – were about 90 minutes drive away and we visited the Cities from time to time and I managed to delve around the bookshops in Minneapolis. For some reason I didn’t miss the Lord of the Rings. Perhaps it was because there was so much other interesting material to read.
Occasionally there would be visits to the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre – so named after its first director and that featured an apron stage – not quite theatre in the round. I was lucky enough to see productions of Richard III with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy as well as Henry V and The Glass Menagerie. On a later visit to the Cities I found that the Guthrie had moved – same basic layout – and we saw an excellent production of To Kill a Mockingbird.
After the end of our bus trip in DC we were flown to San Francisco. In those days the national airline –TEAL had changed its name to Air New Zealand in April 1965 and our flight was in July of that year – flew direct to Auckland not from Los Angeles but from San Francisco.
We were at the San Francisco International Airport and I saw a bookstand that featured a paperback set of Lord of the Rings, published by Ace. I had some spare dollars and thought about it. I already had a set of LOTR. Did I REALLY want another. And after all, the covers were a bit garish. So I passed.
But there is a story behind these editions and they were to achieve a certain notoriety.
In 1965, that very year that I saw them, Ace Books discovered a copyright loophole regarding the American edition of The Lord of the Rings.
The Houghton Mifflin edition had been bound using pages printed in the United Kingdom for the George Allen & Unwin edition. This placed them outside of U.S. copyright law as it stood at the time.
Exploiting this loophole, Ace Books published the first-ever paperback edition of Tolkien's work, for only $0.75, featuring cover art and hand-drawn title pages by Jack Gaughan.This proved to be a commercial success and over 100,000 copies of the book were sold.
When Tolkien and his publisher learned about this he was asked to make revisions in order to renew the copyright; which he agreed to despite being originally against the idea of a paperback.
In a letter to his publisher he reported that the changes were proving difficult as he found few things needing correction. The new edition included revised appendices, an expanded prologue, an index and a new foreword. The foreword also included a note from Tolkien asking readers not to read the Ace Books edition of The Lord of the Rings which was not included in subsequent editions.
In letters to American readers, Tolkien included a note warning that the Ace edition was pirated, and asked Allen & Unwin if this might be done on a larger scale.
He was also helped by a reader, Nan C. Scott, to whom he expressed gratitude in a letter, citing the situation as a major source of stress for him. In a letter to his grandson Michael George Tolkien, he reported that his campaign against Ace Books had been largely successful and he believed the attention may lead to more (authorized) books being sold in America than if Ace Books hadn't pirated it.
The legal loophole that had been exploited meant that, despite the new edition, the original edition of The Lord of the Rings was still in the public domain in America with Tolkien having no copyright claim to it, thus being under no legal requirement to halt selling the book but after facing considerable controversy, and the release of a competitive, authorized (and more complete) edition by Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine Books, Ace agreed let its still-popular edition go out of print and pay royalties to Tolkien.
It was customary to pay British authors 1/4 of profits in royalties but Ace agreed to pay 9,000, the total sum of their profit off The Lord of the Rings.
Because of this notoriety the Ace edition became collectors pieces and I have managed to correct the mistake I made in San Francisco – but for quite a bit more that $0.75 per copy!
Upon my return to New Zealand I commenced at University and was back to my old faithful George Allen and Unwin edition of LOTR. I began what was to become a ritual re-reading of the trilogy on an annual basis, becoming more and more familiar with the text, the story, the nuances, the characters and the themes of the books.
In addition I was reading a considerable amount of science fiction and fantasy some of which had influenced Tolkien. Lord Dunsany and William Morris were two of the fantasy writers I read and enjoyed. I have written elsewhere about the discovery of Dune by Frank Herbert – a book that was quite profound and which I enjoyed as much as I did LOTR.
But the engagement with LOTR was something of a solitary vice. Not a lot of my contemporaries at law school were devotees so there was not a lot of discussion about Tolkien. Understandable in a way. The popularisation of Tolkien and LOTR was going to hit the United States in 1967-68 and was a little slow coming to New Zealand.
In 1969 I came across a boxed de luxe edition of LOTR published by Allen and Unwin in a small single volume but with all the appendices and printed on very fine and delicate rice paper. This was the first of many editions of LOTR that I was to acquire. The hesitation that I experienced in San Francisco was not to be repeated.