Days of the craze #38: Why American (not British) students started the Hobbit craze: American novel-romances as trailblazers for Tolkien
9 December 2021 | Beyond Bree, December, 2021, 1
Notoriously, American high school and college students created the Hobbit craze when they took Tolkien’s fantastic fiction and made a “cult” of it in the mid-1960s. The London Times for 12 Feb. 1966 reported “Don’s tales start U.S. campus craze.”
That American rather than British young people created the craze could be accounted for by the paperbacking of the books by Ace and then Ballantine, both of them being U.S. publishers.
The assumption would be that, if Allen and Unwin had published the books in paperbacks young English people could afford before the Americans published their popularly-priced copies, the craze should have taken off in the British Isles. Of course the availability of inexpensive paperbacks was of great importance for the American Tolkien passion. But two remarks may be made about that idea.…
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