The Hobbit (Rankin and Bass movie edition) - J.R.R. Tolkien

This book represents the first act of reading over which I felt I had personal ownership; strangely enough, it was an act of conservation. This version of The Hobbit contains full-color illustrations from the 1977 Rankin and Bass cartoon version of Tolkien’s novel. The book was technically my parents’ but I took possession of it in 1994 when, discovering it on a shelf full of classic rock records, I discovered that many of the pages had been torn free of the binding and needed to be rearranged. After a painstaking process of referencing page numbers (or simply the corresponding art on pages that did not have numbers) I finally reconstituted the book and was able to discover for the first time the tale of Bilbo Baggins’ fascinating adventure from which the title of this collection is derived.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again. Illus. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.