Tolkien Lord of the Rings 1967 Scarce Canadian Prints

When Ballantine began printing printing paperbacks of three The Lord of the Rings books in the United States, they also received the rights to print the books in Canada. Ballantine published several Canadian printings through 1969. Early in the 1970's Methuen won the Canadian publishing rights until Unwin Paperbacks took over around 1978. These early Canadian printings by Ballantine are rather difficult to find in the United States.  

Books are in good solid condition, but with shelf wear, cover creasing and rubbing, and bowed spines. Small tear to the fore-edge of the front cover of book 2. Book one has a tear near the spine on the first page of the FOREWORD. Each book has an address label attached to the inside of the front cover. Pages are clean, crisp, and mark-free with light age yellowing.  See pictures below. Overall decent vintage copies.

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A bit of history:  Negotiations are quickly made with Ballantine Books to publish The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in paperback after Ace releases pirated copies of the trilogy in 1965. The Authorized (Second) Editions were released by Ballantine in October of the same year.  The hardcover versions of the Second (Revised) Edition were not released until later -- in 1966 in Great Britain, and in 1967 in the United States.

The Hobbit was published while work on the revisions to the trilogy (necessary to establish copyright status) progressed. An artist named Barbara Remington is commissioned to provide the cover illustrations, who does so without ever reading the books! The result was a strange painting on The Hobbit cover including emus, a tree with large pink bulbs, and a lion.  Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien record Tolkien's reaction to the cover in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981): "...I must ask this about the vignette: what has it got to do with the story?  Where is this place?  Why a lion and emus?  And what is the thing in the foreground with the pink bulbs?  I do not understand how anybody who read the tale (I hope you are one) could think such a picture would please the author." (Letter #277 to publisher Rayner Unwin)

The strange emus and bulbs can also be seen on Book 1, and well as some other strange ideas on the other two covers: horses emerging from a river and flying into the air on Book 2, strange snake-like creatures on Book 3.  Anyone familiar with the trilogy know these are out of place!  The lion was removed from the cover of The Hobbit in 1966, but no other changes were made at that time.  Remington's covers were used until 1974 when Ballantine finally replaced them with paintings by the author himself.