The History of The Middle Earth

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

. Copies of HoME that used to live at my local bookstore have gone away to create shelf-space for more copies of the audience-friendly LotR.

What Waterstone's in Reading has done (both branches)is to have entire shelving units devoted to about six different versions of The Hobbit, FoTR, TTT, RoTK and the Sil, massive stacks of LoTR books all over the place and huge tables full of the same (interspersed with the odd copy of Unfinished Tales and numerous copies of the Harvard Lampoon book Bored of the Rings (actually this looks as though it might be quite funny); then they catalogue the Histories under 'T' in the Science Fiction section. Mystifying? It's almost gnostic.