Vermont Softworks:

Pagination cross-reference for The Lord of the Rings

My friend and colleague Andrew Peterson visited this last weekend to help with the initial work on my new pagination cross-reference for The Lord of the Rings. I had decided to include the following editions:

1. Second edition of 1965 (Allen & Unwin 1966, Houghton Mifflin 1967): the three-volume hardcover edition for many years considered the “standard”.

   

2. Ballantine paperbacks (Ballantine Books): I don’t know whether every Ballantine edition has the same pagination; certainly, the copies I have from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s all do; this is probably still the most common edition in the U.S.

   

3. 1994 (Houghton Mifflin 1994): HarperCollins digitized the text for this single-volume 1994 edition illustrated by Alan Lee; though it’s not terribly common, John Rateliff has used it for LotR references in The History of the Hobbit.

   

4. 50th Anniversary Edition “A” (HarperCollins & Houghton Mifflin 2004/5): The one-volume setting of the text edited by Wayne Hammond & Christina Scull and at least one subsequent three-volume set with continuous pagination (see A1 – A5 at Hammond & Scull’s [Lord of the Rings Comparison][0]). Arguably the closest thing we have to an authoritative edition today.

   

5. 50th Anniversary Edition (B): The HarperCollins three-volume setting of Hammond & Scull’s edition (see B1 – B3 at Lord of the Rings Comparison. Essentially the same as the immediately preceding edition, although much less wieldy, somewhat less common, and perhaps slightly more accurate.

   

I’ve built a database which will contain one record per paragraph of The Lord of the Rings, containing the first few words of the paragraph, the paragraph number within the chapter and book (watch for a posting soon describing how this is assigned), and the page number on which the paragraph begins in each of the five editions listed above. In addition, there are spots to put the correlative page in Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull’s The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (if there is one) and Words, Phrases and Passages in The Lord of the Rings (in Parma Eldalamberon XVII.

With help from my wife Karen, Andy and I exhaustively entered the relevant page numbers from all seven volumes for all of Book I, and have tweaked the procedures so further data entry should go somewhat more quickly.

Once we’ve entered the rest of the data, I’ll make everything available freely in spreadsheet form. I may also have the time to create an on-line pagination converter and companion iOS app.

With these tools, we’ll be able to easily find quotations in any of these editions of The Lord of the Rings and see at a glance whether there are relevant notes in Reader’s Companion and Words, Phrases and Passages. In addition, we’ll be able to begin using standardized paragraph numbers when we cite passages in LotR.

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