In a blogpost on their website, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull – authors of The Art of The Hobbit and The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide – have confirmed that a new book, The Art of The Lord of the Rings, will be out next year.
The book will be in the same format as The Art of The Hobbit but with more pages to take account of the greater wealth of content for The Lord of the Rings over The Hobbit. It’s been commissioned in honour of the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Return of the King, which was published in the UK on 20th October 1955.
On the content of the book, Hammond and Scull state:
Of the art in the new book, 101 images are previously unpublished, and of the other 81 pictures, 42 will be published in colour for the first time. These range in size from a tiny coil-like drawing within a manuscript, just two lines of script high, which depicts the overlapping walls of Caras Galadhon, to the ‘First Map’ of Middle-earth, an elaborate working copy made with several sheets glued together and measuring 455 × 499 mm. The resolution of the scans we received from Marquette and from the Bodleian Library, Oxford – the two primary collections of Tolkien’s art – is uniformly high. And since we tend to show artwork in context, our reproductions will present new examples of Tolkien’s handwriting, of the Elvish languages, and of variant inscriptions in Tengwar and Cirth.
The Art of The Lord of the Rings will be published on 8 October 2015.
