Well not EXACTLY on my birthday, but the day before! And amazingly it was several days early.

Folks I am so incredibly thrilled to share with you that I managed to snag one of the limited edition, UK-only, JRR Tolkien illustrated (!!!!!), leather-bound, single volume, Lord of the Rings.

This wasn’t even supposed to be out until two days from now, but somehow my shipment came today!

Look at this!!!

Note that the type, in addition to your typical black text, also includes red type – especially in some key spots that I was not expecting.

There are only 5,000 of these and somehow I got one, this never ever happens for me.

I’m intentionally not going into TOO many details, but I am now the proud owner of some of the last surviving pages of the Book of Mazarbul. I’m not including images of the actual pages for copyright reasons, but they’re in the book as well as three parchment-like actual pages in an envelope – which I did NOT expect to find.

There are also stand-alone folded-up maps of Middle Earth, and an incredibly beautiful “facsimile” of The King’s Letter – which Aragorn sends to Sam in the epilogue to the story which was NOT originally included in the published version of the book!

Anyway, if anyone needs me for the next… I don’t know… forever, I’ll be in Middle Earth reading through this portion of the Red Book of Westmarch.