The Hobbit - 1st State / First American Edition - 1938 - J.R.R. Tolkien JRR

The Hobbit, or There and Back Againby J.R.R. Tolkien

First state of the first American edition, with the bowing hobbit on the title page, and bound in the scarcer horizontally-ribbed cloth that can only be found on first state copies.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

The Hobbit established the blueprint for modern high fantasy. Upon publication, few would have suspected that the novel would have such a profound impact on literature. Seventeen years later, Tolkien published the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, another watershed moment in the genre.