For those of you who have been waiting to purchase The Frodo Franchise in paperback, your chance has arrived. I note that it is available for pre-orders on Amazon. No specific date of release is listed, but in the Fall catalogue that the University of California Press sent me, it’s given as a July publication. I hope that means that those who order it now won’t have to wait long. Amazon is selling it for $12.89. (The list price is $18.95.)

[July 20: I note that the price is now listed at $14.78.]

Ordinarily when the paperback is released, the hardcover goes out of print. My editor informs me, however, that they’re making an exception for The Frodo Franchise and will keep it in print in hardcover as long as copies from the original print run last. I am delighted with the design of the book, both the dust jacket and the cloth covers (and the signatures are sewn rather than glued into the binding, which is getting less common these days, alas). It’s great that those who want hardcover copies for gift-giving or to keep in a proud place on their Tolkien shelves will still have that option.

By the way, the paperback incorporates some corrections. I was relieved to find out how few of those turned out to be needed. Mostly they are typos and misspellings. To a considerable degree, the lack of factual errors can be attributed to my wonderful interviewees, about forty of whom read manuscript chapters and offered suggestions or confirmed that they were fine as they were. I think what I’ll do, for those of you who own the hardback, is to put an errata list here on the blog. I’ll try to get around to that in the near future.