Early American Editions of The Hobbit - The Second Edition - Later Printings of Second Edition

Later Printings of Second Edition

Houghton Mifflin enlarged the book to 14.0 x 21.0 cm commencing with the 15th printing, probably in 1964. At that point they abandoned importing sheets from George Allen and Unwin LTD. Parallel to the single British 15th printing, Houghton Mifflin reprinted The Hobbit nine times from their own plates until the advent of the third edition. They dropped the red color from the maps and removed the color frontispiece so that no color remained in the book's interior. The 15th and remaining printings of the second edition are bound in light green with lettering in dark blue. Beginning with the 18th impression the volumes state the printing number on the reverse of the title page, but the 15th, 16th, and 17th printings do not seem to have any unique marks to distinguish one from the other. The 23rd impression is the final impression of the second edition.

(The 23rd printing belongs to the second edition, since the text is unchanged. The 24th printing, though it does not explicitly state so, clearly belongs to the third edition: it replaces the second edition's description of the revised edition with a description of runes; the type is completely reset; and the page count increases to 317.)

While the Allen and Unwin sheets appear to have been printed from Linotype plates, clues suggest that Houghton Mifflin opted to filmset the later printings of the second edition. They did not phototypeset new plates; rather they seem to have photographed the 14th impression. While the sheets are larger, the type block itself is identical. All the print surface flaws that the Allen and Unwin plates had accumulated up to that point were faithfully reproduced in film for the remaining printings. Because any number of copies of the film can be made and stored for future use, the type does not degrade from printing to printing the way it would with Linotype. If the film tears or loses its crispness, it may simply be replaced with a duplicate. Hence, comparisons of type degradation to sort out the 15th, 16th, and 17th impressions would seem fruitless. Indeed the 23rd impression's type block seems just as effectively identical.

By settling on a single binding color and dropping all color from the interior, Houghton Mifflin cheapened the book and killed the charm of the second edition. These later printings are not considered to be as 'collectible' as the earlier printings.