Hello and welcome to Talking Tolkien. Today we're going to look at a recently released edition of Alan Lee's The Hobbit Sketchbook and The Lord of the Ring Sketchbook. It's been released in this Deluxe edition box set as it says on the back. So we'll have a look at this. Before we get on excited and go into it, quick overview on who Alan Lee is if you don't know. So when in 1992 they decided or the publishers decided they were going to release a version of The Lord of the Rings to mark 100 years since the birth of Jaira Tolkien. They decided to get an author into pain to load of pictures that would go along with the story of Lord of the Rings. To do that they chose Alan Lee. This was the first volume of it. You can see the cover there which he painted. And throughout this, there's, I can't remember how many there are, there's loads of pictures. If you can see that, all right. Those are pictures throughout the book anyway that he he illustrated and that was a lot of inspiration when Peter Jackson came to do the film adaptions in was it like 2001? He got in touch with Alan Lee and asked him to do a lot of the production design on that. That then resulted in The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook which was released in about 2005 and this had a combination of artwork that Alan Lee had done from the initial books that we saw there in 91 and also just a load of sketches that were done for the film as well. So that was all due with The Lord of the Rings. And then it was announced this year that they would release a companion edition to The Lord of the Rings one which focused on the work that Alan Lee had done for the Hobbit films. And so as well as having this Deluxe edition, you can also buy the Hobbit Sketchbook on its own as a standalone one which is more in line with this. But for today we'll look at this which was also released which was a Deluxe edition of both of those books. So if you've seen this, in fact, yes so it is The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook. So this is the one that is exactly the same as this. It's just in different binding or whatever. So we'll have a look at that shortly and then the brand new book is The Hobbit Sketchbook there. So again this has got stuff that he did for the Hobbit films. So yeah so we get this nice hard box to put them in. It's very nice. And then we get the two books there. So as you can see there, there's no dust jacket or anything like this designed to be Deluxe which I mean I guess means you don't have a dust jacket on them anymore. But they are quite nice. Let's see if you can have a look in the light there. You know it's light embossed cover. You get these. You can see in the middle there's like two stickers which they're nice but I had this issue with the the Father Christmas letters that came out recently the Deluxe edition of that. It had a stamp on the front page which is embossed but it wasn't stuck on properly so it was all like it didn't match up with the edges and it just looked a little bit cheap which when you're paying quite a lot of money for these. I mean the RRP of this was 75 pound. You can get that quite a lot cheaper than that though but still you would expect a bit of quality check in. And it's the same with the Egypt probably can't see on there but the edges of this don't really match up with the embossed section for it. They're the same on that one which I mean I'm not going to lose sleep over it but yeah it's a bit annoying. Okay so now we'll have a look in the book some self-showing. Okay so here's the first one the Lord of the Rings sketchbook. You can see the embossed cover there. You might be able to see what I mean about the edges where here you've got a bit of a gap and there's no gap there and at the top there's a big gap but like I say it's not going to the world. Lord of the Rings sketchbook. Okay so here's a load of other stories that have been illustrated by Alanley not just talking books but a number of other ones. You can see there that this is says at the bottom printed and bound in Spain if that's of interest and your illustrations not in 91 2005 this is based on the 2005 edition. I don't believe there's anything different in here so if you have got that previous edition no things anything additional in here. Okay now as you can contents page as well. But to give you an idea of what kind of thing we get in here we get a few words about the process that Alanley goes through when he designs and creates these drawings as well as examples of his sketches. Fange on that. Obviously depends on how much you like Alanley's drawings as to how much you actually you know we'd like to get this book. I think they're really good. I probably prefer him except maybe Ted Nussmith and he's my favourite Tolkien illustrator. So we go you get a lot of sketches and things like that. Nice one there. Then we get a map as well at the end. Recognize that writing. Okay so that's the Lord of the Ring sketchbook and now I'll have a look at the one that you've probably not seen before which is the Hobbit sketchbook. Now what's unique about this edition? Okay now let you see the map and these start there. That's nice like that. Yeah what's unique about this one? If I can find the page. This edition will this specially bound and slip case edition has been limited to 3000 numbered copies signed by the artist. This copy number so for mine I get number 932 I have 3000 and there's the signature so Paul's Adamley he does do a lot of sign and I wonder how much time he spends signing books compared to drawing pictures. I'd be interested to know but there we go. So he'd already signed nearly 3000 before we got to this one. Bless him. That's nice. There you go. Okay. Yeah some nice. Got nice introduction in there. This is the first time I've seen this as well so I'm sorry I'm not giving too much insight into what's in here but I just wanted to do this as a way for you to see what kind of thing is in the book. So yeah as you'd expect it's very similar to the Lord of the Ring sketchbook in the way it's designed but you can a lot just a lot more drawing sketches in here talking about water colour there. It's good yeah this definitely loads to get you teeth into here you know you spend a long time looking through these pictures and reading about them. Merkwood. Okay. There we are. So thanks for watching that's been a look at the Hobbit sketchbook and the Lord of the Ring sketchbook available now from all good booksellers. I'll stick a link down in the video description if you wanted to go straight to that and once again thanks for watching. See you soon. Bye.