No responses yet – published on Oct, 28 2009 at 16:02 under Hobby.
Since I found out that Prof. Tolkien has written more then the Lord of the Rings, I have tried to read every single bit of it. But I was never able to lay hands on The History of Middle-Earth – I would say the central part of Prof. Tolkien’s work. A problem was in fact that I always wish that the books within a series look “harmonic”. I hate the fact that publishers aren’t able to publish books of one series in the same dimensions, with harmonic covers and on the same type of paper… I often wonder why this isn’t possible.
The History of Middle-Earth was a special problem, nevertheless. There were several editions, but it was difficult – or better impossible – to get ALL books of one edition, and if they were available on Ebay or Amazon (usually in used state) they were to expensive for my flavor. I like the new paperback edition of Harper Collins with cover arts by John Howe, but was not able to get all twelve books – as a matter of fact they are not available at the official Harper Collins site either.
Long years I haven’t thought of looking again into this matter, but at our last Tolkien regulars table we were talking about the HoME and I mentioned that it is so difficult to find the series in one piece. The day after I tried my luck and I was quite surprised to see that the complete History of Middle-Earth was available in a hardcover edition of three volumes on Amazon.co.uk.
Part 1 includes volume I to V of the History of Middle-Earth, Part 2 holds volume VI to IX – these books are also known as The History of The Lord of the Rings – and Part 3 covers the last three books, volume X to XII:
- The Book of Lost Tales, Part One
- The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two
- The Lays of Beleriand
- The Shaping of Middle-earth
- The Lost Road and Other Writings
- The Return of the Shadow
- The Treason of Isengard
- The War of the Ring
- Sauron Defeated
- Morgoth’s Ring
- The War of the Jewels
- The Peoples of Middle-earth
I am now really looking forward to submerge into Ardas history, but I fear that this will be a task that maybe requires more than a winter. 
As a bonus I also bought a small book that holds all Poems from The Lord of the Rings with wonderful art by Alan Lee. It is really useful when you are searching for a certain poem and have not the books at hand, and it perfectly fits into every bag.
