First, I have already thanked
Nurumaiel personally for her wonderful post, but I want to add my thanks here. Not many of our families have been so intimately involved with introducing us to LotR. You have some great memories there!
Snowdog - Those categories are fantastic. I fall into the "Old-School Book Fan". But you might want to have at least one "sub-category" in that group: the "Frodo Lives" generation, the U.S. college students from the late sixties whom Tolkien felt had good inclinations but were also a little nuts and who came at the book from a different angle than his own. (He was undoubtedly correct about this!) Everyone had the books in college and many had posters plastered on their dorm or apartment walls -- usually the psychedelic one done by Barbara Remington that JRRT couldn't stand! We even had pins that said "Gandalf for President".
A number of this group were "tree huggers" and thumbed their nose at the establishment, instead specilizing in baking bread and toting protest signs! Certainly not what Tolkien had anticipated, but we saw LotR as a way to break out of the "bourgeois" constraints left over from the late Fifties and early Sixties.
Looking back, I have to smile but it was a time of excitement. The general reader in the U.S. did not yet know about the books (totally unlike today), and we felt we'd stumbled onto a secret world that was all our own....
Just curious....but is there anyone else out there who had a similar experience in college?