Senior Editor Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey has licensed mass market paperback rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin from Deborah Engel at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The mass market edition should be out in Summer 2010.
According to Del Rey’s David Moench, HMH’s hardcover edition “spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list… and was a trade paper Times bestseller as well, receiving rave reviews. It is the first complete book by J.R.R. Tolkien since the posthumous Silmarillion was published in 1977.
Begun in 1918, The Children of Húrin was one of three “Great Tales” Tolkien worked on throughout his life, though he never realized his ambition to see it published. His son, Christopher, edited the complete work from his father’s many drafts, and it represents the culmination of a tireless thirty-year endeavor to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s vast body of unpublished work to a wide audience.”
Related articles previously published on SFScope:
HarperCollins UK selling electronic Tolkien, offering chance to win limited print editions (20 April 2009)
Best-selling books of 2007 (27 March 2008)
The British The Children of Hurin audiobook now available in the US (13 December 2007)
Tolkien’s Children of Hurin selling very well (4 May 2007)