Tolkien is dead and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure. I wanted to check up on that, and found this: So far from losing money [as exp

Tolkien is dead and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure. I wanted to check up on that, and found this: So far from losing money [as expected], sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales. The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in 1965. Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition. By 1968 The Lord of the Rings had almost become the Bible of the "Alternative Society". This development produced mixed feelings in the author. On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously. source: http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html