Douglas A. Anderson

• 1. Introduction

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  Douglas Allen Anderson was born on the 30th of December 1959, and he has built a career around the fine print of fantasy books. He is an American writer and editor who works on fantasy and medieval literature. His special focus is textual analysis of J. R. R. Tolkien, which means tracing how a book changed from one printing to the next. How does one scholar come to shape the way readers meet Tolkien's own words? And why does he spend so much effort on authors that most readers have never heard of?

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• 2. Oxford Friendship

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  Anderson was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, but his road into Tolkien scholarship ran through Oxford. In 1978 he became friends there with Humphrey Carpenter. Carpenter was then at work on a biography of Auden, and Anderson assisted him with it. He also helped with The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, a collection of Tolkien's own correspondence. That apprenticeship in handling Tolkien's words was followed by a first book of his own, about a children's story.

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• 3. Annotating The Hobbit

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  The Annotated Hobbit appeared in 1988 as Anderson's first published book. It grew from a close study of how Tolkien kept revising The Hobbit in later editions, after The Lord of the Rings had been published. The finished volume placed Anderson's detailed explanations right beside Tolkien's text. A revised and illustrated edition followed in 2002. In 1990 the book won the Mythopoeic Award for scholarship. Its publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had by then already turned to him for a far larger task.

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• 4. Settling Tolkien's Text

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  The Houghton Mifflin revised American edition of The Lord of the Rings came out in 1987, and Anderson's textual studies sit at its core. The edition folded in changes that had been made to the British editions at Tolkien's direction. Anderson wrote a "Note on the Text" explaining the history of those changes. Later editions kept the note, with some minor revisions. In 1993 he and Wayne G. Hammond published J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. Anderson then joined Verlyn Flieger and Michael D. C. Drout as a founding editor of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. Its first volume appeared in 2004, and he co-edited the first four volumes, through 2007. That same year Houghton Mifflin issued his J.R.R. Tolkien: Interviews, Reminiscences, and Other Essays. Yet a second shelf of his work has little to do with Tolkien, and it begins with Leonard Cline and Kenneth Morris.

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• 5. Forgotten Fantasy Authors

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  In 1992 Anderson edited two books by writers few readers could name: The Chalchiuhite Dragon by Kenneth Morris, and The Lady of Frozen Death and Other Weird Tales by Leonard Cline. More Morris followed, including The Dragon Path in 1995 and Book of The Three Dragons in 2004. Cline's The Dark Chamber returned in 2005. That same year he assembled a volume of the best short stories of William Hope Hodgson, titled Adrift on The Haunted Seas. He also edited modern editions of work by Evangeline Walton. Other editions reached further afield, such as The Marvellous Land of Snergs by E. A. Wyke-Smith in 1995. In 2002 came Eyes of the God, gathering the weird fiction and poetry of R. H. Barlow. Anderson turned the same interest into books of his own. Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy appeared from Ballantine Books in 2003. A 2008 companion from Del Ray, Tales Before Narnia, pushed the idea toward science fiction too.

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• 6. Bookseller and Publisher

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  In Ithaca, New York, Anderson worked as a bookseller, and later he did the same work in Indiana. That trade gave him daily contact with old and half-forgotten titles. He now runs a publishing business called Nodens Books, which aims to revive the work of forgotten authors. The press carries the editor's habits into the market itself, beyond the pages of his annotated editions. He also serves as a visiting lecturer at Signum University, carrying his work on Tolkien and medieval literature into teaching.

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