Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
If you're talking about Ace Books, what they did in printing a completely unauthorised paperback edition of LOTR was pretty shameful, IMHO, and of extremely dubious legality. Such people don't deserve to have their "name suppressed".
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He was, and it
was legal. They weren't sued for it.
As mentioned, they
did wind up making a payment to Tolkien based on sales of their edition, in an effort to defuse the bad press they got from it. Ace has subsequently changed hands and management, and it a much better house these days.
I knew the guy at Ace Books responsible for that move. He came out of the old pulps, where sharp practices were the rule rather than the exception, so his move wasn't a huge surprise in retrospect. You can even argue that he did Tolkien a favor. It's not clear Ballantine would have picked up LoTR and become hugely successful with it if Ace hadn't demonstrated there was a market. The success of LoTR spawned the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which returned a lot of other classic stuff to print, and arguably created the fantasy genre as it exists now.
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Dennis