Great subject for discussion,
berkley!
I first became aware of Tolkien's work in the early '80s via the
Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. My best friend back then, David, introduced me to playing D&D when I was about 8 or 9, and that got me into fantasy generally. Although he was the same age as me, he had already been reading
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings for a year or two, having "borrowed" the books from his parent's library (they were a couple of old Hippies and very into their sci-fi and fantasy literature).
Myself, I didn't actually read any Tolkien at that age, being much more interested in
Star Wars. But, as best friends do, David and I talked constantly about our passions and obviously Tolkien came up a lot, so I kinda got to know the characters of Middle-earth almost by osmosis. However, I do remember reading short excerpts of
The Hobbit on occasion, when I stayed over at David's house -- I guess this would've been 1982 or 1983, when I was 11 or 12 -- and like you
berkley, it was this mid-70s paperback addition that my friend had...
David also had the
Lord of the Rings Fotonovel, which was a comic book made up of stills from the 1978 animated movie, and I read that a lot at the time too. That's how I first became familiar with the story and characters of
The Lord of the Rings. I actually picked up a copy of this Fotonovel recently for purely nostalgic reasons, and here it is...
Despite my best friend's enthusiasm for the books, I didn't read
The Hobbit or
The Lord of The Rings in their entirety until I bought my own copies in 1986, aged 13. First I picked up a brand new paperback of
The Hobbit, and it was this particular edition that I had...
Then, as luck would have it, I found the single volume paperback collection of LotRs at a jumble sale some months later for a ridiculously low price, like 20p or something! It was this late '70s paperback edition that I got...
Once I'd actually read these books, I became fully obsessed with Middle-earth and would re-read them again and again as a teenager.
It would've been 1987, when I was 14 or 15, that I found a copy of
The Silmarillion gathering dust in the library of my Secondary School, but, as I noted earlier in this thread, I struggled to get further than about a chapter into it. Since then, I've tried another two times to read that book and every time I end up giving up after about a chapter. I am definitely considering a fourth attempt after reading people's comments in this thread about how best to approach it.
Since David and I were both into fantasy role-playing games and books like
Dungeons & Dragons,
Fighting Fantasy,
Pendragon,
Tunnels & Trolls (along with other non-fantasy games such as
Call of Cthulhu,
Star Trek and
Judge Dredd), it was a no-brainer that we'd start playing Middle-Earth Role-Playing, or MERP, when it came out. Wikipedia says that MERP was first published in 1984, but we definitely weren't playing it that early. I remember playing it from 1987 or so, until about 1989. Maybe it came out later over here in the UK, or maybe we were just slow on the uptake.
Anyway, as the '90s dawned and my 20s came, I began to read Tolkien less often, preferring instead to get my Middle-earth fix from the BBC radio dramatisations of
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings, which I purchased in these two rather attractive cassette collections...
I'm not sure I read any of Tolkien's books in my 30s, although I continued to listen to the above radio dramatisations fairly regularly. Plus, of course, the Peter Jackson's LotRs movies started coming out, which I loved (his
Hobbit was terrible though!). I have the extended edition DVD box set of the LotRs trilogy and I still think that they are fantastic cinematic adaptations of the books -- much better than we fans had any right to expect them to be.
I last re-read
The Hobbit about four years ago, and I re-read
The Lord of the Rings only about 18 months ago. These days I have a set of late '90s hardcover editions of
The Hobbit and LotRs, with the trilogy being in a box set. My copy of
The Silmarillion is a 1977 first edition hardcover. My original mid-80s copy of
The Hobbit was given away to charity when I upgraded to the hardcover, and my late '70s LotRs basically fell apart from re-reading. Here's what the Tolkien section of my book shelves looks like today...
