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Abercrombie, Lascelles (1881–1938). Lascelles Abercrombie read Science at the Owens College, Manchester, but after only two sessions (1900–2) turned instead to journalism, poetry, drama, and the study of literature. A major figure in the Georgian poets, he was most famously associated with the group of writers, also including Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas, that clustered around Dymock in Gloucestershire. His first book of verse, Interludes and Poems, was published in 1908, and his collected Poems in 1930. Two of his poems, ‘Roses Can Wound’ and ‘“All Last Night …”’, appeared in *Leeds University Verse 1914–24 (1924), to which Tolkien was also a contributor. Abercrombie also wrote critical studies, including Thomas Hardy (1912) and The Epic (1914), and works on aesthetic theory, such as An Essay towards a Theory of Art (1922). During the First World War, declared unfit for reasons of health, he served as a munitions examiner. In 1919 he was named Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Liverpool.

      In 1922 Abercrombie became Professor of English Literature at the University of *Leeds, succeeding *George S. Gordon; Tolkien, then Reader in English Language at Leeds, had also sought the chair (a new professorship, of English Language, was created for him two years later). In 1925, when Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair of Anglo-Saxon at *Oxford, Abercrombie as his head of department at Leeds wrote a glowing letter of recommendation. He named Tolkien ‘my principal colleague in the English Department’, who ‘has throughout acted as my advisor and collaborator in the conduct and policy of the department as a whole. … I have never consulted him without gaining an illumination that can penetrate as well as expatiate. But I must not omit to mention that I have gained at least as much from the keen artistic sensibility as from the science of his scholarship’ (*An Application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford by J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of the English Language in the University of Leeds, June 25, 1925).

      In 1929 Abercrombie left Leeds for the Hildred Carlile Professorship of English Literature at Bedford College, University of London. He remained there until 1935, when he was elected Goldsmiths’ Reader in English at Oxford and a fellow of Merton College.

      See further, The Georgian Revolt, 1910–1922: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal by Robert H. Ross (1965). The standard bibliography is A Bibliography and Notes on the Works of Lascelles Abercrombie by Jeffrey Cooper (1969).

Ace Books controversy. When *The Lord of the Rings was first issued in the United States (1954–6) its publisher, the Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston (*Publishers), chose to import printed sheets from Great Britain for binding domestically, rather than newly typeset and print a separate edition. They had long imported copies of *The Hobbit and *Farmer Giles of Ham, and continued to do so for The Lord of the Rings through the 1950s and early 1960s. For a work as unusual as The Lord of the Rings, importation in the first instance presented less financial risk; but in the long run too, at this time, it was more economical for Houghton Mifflin to import sheets than to print their own, and to the advantage also of George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers), as exporters of the books, and of Tolkien, because it lowered costs to both of his publishers and made his books more affordable to readers.

      This practice meant, however, that the number of imported copies soon exceeded that allowed by the so-called ‘manufacturing clause’ in United States copyright law. U.S. law from 1891 until 1986 sought to protect the American printing industry by limiting the importation of books printed abroad and by promoting domestic manufacture. Under the law as amended in 1949 and in effect at the time of first publication of The Lord of the Rings an American publisher had six months in which to register ad interim copyright for a foreign work written in English, and then five years in which to typeset and print the book in the United States to qualify for full copyright; and in the meantime, no more than 1,500 copies printed abroad could be imported. In contrast, copyright in Great Britain and elsewhere under the Berne Convention (the international copyright agreement to which the United States, almost alone among nations, was not a signatory) was subject to fewer formalities, and was considered in force ipso facto for a living author.

      Houghton Mifflin initially imported 1,500 copies of The Fellowship of the Ring and 1,000 copies of The Two Towers, numbers at or within the limit of the ‘manufacturing clause’. They applied for and received ad interim copyright for these volumes, and included copyright notices in the first printing of each to reflect this protection. By the time The Return of the King was ready, however, it was in such demand that Houghton Mifflin imported 5,000 copies, in order to sell as many as possible without delay. Because more than 1,500 copies were imported in the first instance, The Return of the King could not receive ad interim copyright, and did not include an American copyright notice in any printing. As soon as the total number of imported copies of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers exceeded 1,500, Houghton Mifflin omitted copyright notices in those volumes as well.

      Knowing that they had passed the limit of imported copies, Tolkien’s publishers began to be concerned about the validity of his U.S. copyright in The Hobbit in the early 1960s, during discussions about the sale of film rights to that work (see *Adaptations). At this time also, with the popularity of The Lord of the Rings well established, American reprint publishers sought to sublicense a paperback edition, but Houghton Mifflin rebuffed all such overtures. In part this was because they did not wish to ‘cheapen’ a work which still sold well in hardback, but also because they were unsure whether they had the authority to grant an exclusive license to publish a paperback edition, given the now questionable copyright status of The Lord of the Rings under U.S. law.

      In January 1965 Houghton Mifflin advised Allen & Unwin that the U.S. copyrights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings might be open to challenge. Although managers at both firms thought it unlikely that any reputable publisher would take advantage of the situation, they also felt that action should be taken to secure U.S. copyright for the two works beyond any doubt. On 8 February 1965 *Rayner Unwin of George Allen & Unwin explained the situation to Tolkien and asked him to provide revisions and extra material for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, such as a long-promised index for the latter, so that the books could be newly submitted for copyright in the United States.

      Before Tolkien could do so, however, Ace Books of New York, a well-known publisher of science fiction, issued their own edition of The Lord of the Rings beginning in May 1965, at the then cheap price of seventy-five cents per volume. Ace Books held that the work was in the public domain in the United States, and therefore could be published by anyone without permission. Donald A. Wollheim, the chief editor at Ace Books, said in a contemporary article that it was ‘no secret’ to him that The Lord of the Rings had never been copyrighted in the United States: ‘I had known it from the moment I’d first bought a copy of the Houghton Mifflin edition in a book store when it had first appeared in 1954. One glance at the page following the title page startled me. No copyright, no date of publication. Just the line “Printed in Great Britain” …’ (‘The Ace Tolkiens’, Lighthouse 13 (August 1965), pp. 16–17). In fact, the first printing of the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship of the Ring had included a full statement of rights on the verso of its title-leaf, including ‘Copyright, 1954, by J.R.R. Tolkien’, and the American Two Towers likewise had a proper notice in its first printing. Wollheim evidently had seen a later printing, and not ‘when it [The Fellowship of the Ring only] had first appeared in 1954’. His concern about the inclusion of a copyright notice stemmed from a requirement for this in most books protected under U.S. copyright; but he overlooked an exception to the law as it then existed, for books protected by ad interim copyright.

      In the same article Wollheim refuted criticism that was already coming to his attention, within months of publication of the Ace Books edition, in regard to ‘literary