[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I have an old paperback of LR that I tried to repair with epoxy resin. It didn't work. That book is now bisected at page 492, with Merry and Pippin in Treebeard's house. You can't throw them away, you know.

Don't lie to yourself, Mith; you know they give you pleasure.

My hoard isn't ridiculous yet, since I don't have six copies of the same book. However, I do confess to duplicate copies and volumes I've never read. I've got a first edition and a fiftieth anniversary edition of LR as well as my reading copy and the aforementioned wrecked paperback; an early Silmarillion; two copies of The Hobbit; photocopies of academic articles by Tolkien and everything by or about him that I've been able to afford. I bought the three-volume hard-back of HME and then kept collecting the paperbacks so that I wouldn't have to open it. I've got a first edition of Pictures by JRR Tolkien that I daren't touch any more and a fourth impression of The Road Goes Ever On with sheet music I can't even read. What can you do? They put up this big stall full of books at Oxonmoot: I'm not made of stone.

I think this is all perfectly sensible. It's like a drinker's secret stash of Laphroaig down the back of the sink. You never know when a bizarre train of events will leave you desperately scrabbling through a cupboard looking for a second-edition of Unfinished Tales, or the last copy of Mr. Bliss that you know you haven't lent out. How convenient if there's one in every cupboard.