The End is the Beginning: Into the Archive

 

I used my birthday money from Susan and Andy to order several books on Amazon. Today the first one came in the mail. It was an old Ballantine Books edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, completing the trilogy I started collecting last week at EntertainMart.  It cost a mere $6.55; shipping included. Apart from a slightly swayed spine (further besmirched by a modern barcode sticker) and a tiny nick in the lower right-hand cover (apparently once a tiny fold; it flaked off almost as soon as I took it out of the shipping sleeve), it is still in fairly good shape for a Forty-First Printing from 1973 (making it a fifty-year-old paperback), and perfectly adequate for my simple criteria. The cover is of course by Barbara Remington (died in 2020 at the age of 90), the famous ‘emus and Christmas bulbs’ artist. Finally forcing myself to look at it closely, I also see some sort of dragonish creature guarding a bridge and a tiny frog in the tree, two more irrelevancies to the story. Fun!