It is surprising to see how time can fly. I wished I could say that it was mainly because I was having a good time! Sadly enough since January I have been working a lot, had some big decisions to make at my company and was facing many problems on all fields. Glad to say that somehow all is back to normal, but still have a lot of catching up to do. So let us start today by looking to some of the more interesting books that will be released this year.

Last year I was asked by David Brawn to scan a dustjacket from English and Medieval Studies, Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Since I felt that the jacket on my edition was not of the finest quality I pointed him to a fine copy that was available on Abebooks. It was a good thing, since now that I see the result it really looks amazing.

The book is edited by Professor Tolkien's successors in his two Oxford chairs, C. L. Wrenn and Norman Davies, and includes the following essays:

- The Old English Epic Style by A. Campbell- The Appreciation of Old English Metre by A' J. Bliss- King Alfred’s Last War by M. E. Griffiths- Six Questions of Old and Middle English Morphology by C. E. Bazell- Studies in Late West Saxon Labialization and Delabialization by Pamela Gradon- The Bodmer Fragment of Ælfic’s Homily for Septuagesima Sunday by N. R. Ker- A Neglected Manuscript of British History by S. R. T. O. d'Ardenne- ormulum: Words copied by Jan van Vliet from parts now lost by R. W. Burchfield- Norse Alliterative Phrases in the Ormulum by E. S. Olszewska- The Affiliations of the manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse by E. J. Dobson- God and Man in Troilus and Criseyde by T. P. Dunning- Chaucer’s Translation of the Bible by W. Meredith Thompson- God’s Wenches and the Light that Spoke (a note on Langland’s kind of poetry) by Nevill Coghill- The Anthropological Approach by C. S. Lewis;

Tolkien's autograph

The original edition of English and Medieval Studies, Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday had blue boards with Tolkien's autograph printed on it, another authograph was printed under the frontispiece photograph of J.R.R. Tolkien - and is one of the fascimile signatures that tend to be wrongly seen as an original Tolkien autograph. I wonder how HarperCollins will reproduce it in this edition and if it will increase or decrease the problem with ebay sellers thinking they are offering a genuine autograph.

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