Getting Back in the Hobbit

Only 114 days to go. As all good Tolkienites know, December 18 marks the opening of The Two Towers, the second movie—following last year's The Fellowship of the Ring—in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Readers are clearly tuned in to the date as well, as four Tolkien books are making their reappearances on this week's paperback charts. Two Del Rey mass market trilogy titles, The Two Towers and The Fellowship of the Ring, return at #6 and #11, respectively, while The Hobbit takes the #9 position. The trilogy's conclusion, The Return of the King, is #17 on the mass market list. In addition to the Del Rey titles, Houghton Mifflin's one-volume work, The Lord of the Rings, returns to PW's trade paper list. No doubt because of the first movie's tremendous popularity (it grossed more than $313 million and stayed in the box-office top 10 for seven weeks) and its recent home video release, these titles are showing up on the charts much earlier than they did last year: though The Hobbit hit the list in June, the remaining titles didn't appear until October (Fellowship plus the HM omnibus) and December (Two Towers , Return of the King). Houghton Mifflin reports 750,000 copies in print of its trade paperback. Del Rey's year-to-date sales figures are: numbers are: Hobbit, 800,000; Fellowship, 670,000; Two Towers, one million; and Return, 670,000.

—With reporting by Dick Donahue