calimac

The June Locus has an interview with Betsy Wollheim, bringing up the issue of her father's unauthorized first paperback of The Lord of the Rings from Ace Books in 1965. At the time, Don Wollheim was vilified for exploiting (what he thought was) a copyright loophole: his act was denounced as unethical, if not illegal, by readers, SFWA, and Tolkien himself - this is why for decades afterwards the Ballantine edition carried a box on the back cover reading "This paperback edition, and no other, has been published with my consent and co-operation," and the foreword carried a dark complaint about the "grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project: dealings one might expect of Saruman in his decay rather than from the defenders of the West."

More recently it's become common to excuse or defend Don Wollheim. It's only right, I suppose, that his daughter and heir should speak in his defense, but she says a number of things that are misleading, probably inaccurate, or in the end indefensible.

When he called up Professor Tolkien in 1964 and asked if he could publish Lord of the Rings as Ace paperbacks

It's highly doubtful that he did this, for two reasons. First, according to Tolkien scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, there is nothing in either Tolkien's papers or the archives of his legitimate publishers to suggest any such thing happened, and indeed evidence in Tolkien's correspondence that it did not.

Second, according to Wollheim's statement in Saturday Review (23 Oct. 1965), as referred to in the official statement in the November SFWA Bulletin, "Ace is willing to pay Tolkien royalties but does not know his address." Nobody believed at the time that Ace was trying very hard to find out. The address was not, at the time, very hard to find. If this story is true, Wollheim already knew how to reach him.

Tolkien said he would never allow his great works to appear in so 'degenerate a form' as the paperback book.

It's possible that Tolkien felt this way, though neither I, nor Hammond and Scull, can recall anything he ever said to that effect. Tolkien's feelings about paperbacks might well have been soured by a bad experience a few years earlier with a Puffin edition of The Hobbit. Puffin undertook a massive copy-edit of an already published book, changing "dwarves" to "dwarfs" etc., without telling anybody about it. Tolkien discovered this several months after publication when he happened to look at a copy (Letters, p. 312-3). So if Tolkien did say this, he'd have had to add "...again."

In which case a pledge that you won't touch the text (Ace didn't, even reprinting both the first volume's promise of an index and the last volume's apology for lacking one) would be highly mollifying.

In any case it's worth remembering that it wasn't unusual in those days for a novel, even a reasonably well-selling one as LOTR was, not to have a softcover edition for many years after publication; and that paperbacks still did have a lurid Jim Thompson connotation to many people. The paperbacks (from other publishers) of C.S. Lewis's novels, abridged and with garish covers and ridiculous titles (Voyage to Venus, The Tortured Planet) only confirmed this. Ace was one of the worst offenders: I've always liked Terry Carr's line that if the Bible ever appeared as an Ace Double, Wollheim would title it War God of Israel/The Thing With Three Souls.

This image of paperbacks was already improving rapidly, however, and Ballantine, despite its absurd (if evocative) covers to its first LOTR paperbacks, was doing a lot to improve it. (Ace made a major contribution when the Ace Specials started three years later.)

He did a little research and discovered a loophole in the copyright.

He thought he discovered it, but a court decision eventually established that the copyright was valid and had always been so. If you're discussing the matter today, you really ought to add that.

This brash action (which ultimately benefited his primary competitors) was really the Big Bang that founded the modern fantasy field, and only someone like my father could have done that.

This was Don's own justification as well as his daughter's, and coming from a man who claimed to be an admirer of Tolkien's work it's very disturbing, because the whole "To do a great good, do a little wrong" line of thinking is completely alien to Tolkien's morality. It's like saying that if Gollum hadn't attacked Frodo, the Ring would not have been destroyed. Now, this is true: what's absurd is the notion that it excuses Gollum or makes him in any way admirable. The credit in LOTR goes entirely to Frodo, for having shown mercy to a creature he had every reason to kill. By this reasoning, the credit - if any - for the fantasy boom should still go to Tolkien, for allowing an authorized edition after Ace's. And the idea that the boom wouldn't have happened without the Ace edition depends on the premise that otherwise there would have been no paperback at all, which I doubt. In any case LOTR was seeping into popular culture through the hardcover anyway. The Tolkien Society of America was founded five months before Ace published. The TSA wouldn't have grown as fast as it did without a paperback, but something was in the air. And, I suspect, a paperback would soon have followed.

He did pay Tolkien

And agreed to put his edition out of print, not the action of a justified man. This claim of Betsy's is the gold standard of misleading. Don did these things only after tremendous grumbling on his part, and a campaign against Ace from readers, and the publication of the Ballantine edition, and a major formal protest from SFWA, and a number of authors threatening to boycott submission of their works to Ace until this was cleared up.

But if he hadn’t done it, who knows when — or if — those books would have been published in paperback?

That is a good question, but I think the answer is, "very soon." Betsy's implication that the omission would have lasted to or beyond Tolkien's death in 1973 seems quite wrong to me. The entire paperback field had changed by then, was already changing in 1965. I think Tolkien's publishers would have seen the money to be made, and talked the author into it as they talked him into a film rights deal. Tolkien could be talked into things, especially if they'd make him money, which was why he'd reluctantly agreed to the Puffin paperback Hobbit deal (Letters, p. 302). Despite his extreme anger at the Ballantine covers and their inept publicity, they kept the Hobbit/LOTR publishing contract and issued three more volumes of Tolkien's work while he yet lived. Clearly sales had reconciled Tolkien to this; I think the prospect of sales could also have done so.

What would have happened to Lord of the Rings in terms of the public consciousness? And who knows what would have happened to the entire fantasy industry?

We would have been spared literally hundreds of truly awful Tolclone novels, but I suppose I shouldn't say that.