That the printer had quietly reset The Fellowship of the Ring, and that copies had been issued without proof having been read by the author, never became known to Tolkien while his publisher, Rayner Unwin, learned of it only thirty-eight years after the fact. At the same time, other errors survived undetected, among them some five dozen which entered as long ago as 1954, in the resetting of The Fellowship of the Ring published as its ‘second impression’. Anderson comments in the preceding ‘Note on the Text’, each of those editions was itself corrected, and each also introduced new errors.
The present text is based on the setting of the HarperCollins three-volume hardcover edition of 2002, which in turn was a revision of the HarperCollins reset edition of 1994. In this edition of The Lord of the Rings, prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, between three and four hundred emendations have been made following an exhaustive review of past editions and printings.
