(EN) LocusMag Archive Page - Betsy Wollheim: The Family Trade, su locusmag.com. URL consultato il 29 marzo 2019.
«“My father was genuinely self-motivated, not other-directed in any way, and he could never have achieved what he did if he cared what anybody else thought. So the fact that he was so difficult, so antisocial, helped make him as great as he was. The most obvious example is Tolkien. Today I meet people and frequently the only thing they know about my father is that he published the unauthorized Lord of the Rings. He was vilified for that, but what really happened from his point of view was interesting. When he called up Professor Tolkien in 1964 and asked if he could publish Lord of the Rings as Ace paperbacks, Tolkien said he would never allow his great works to appear in so ‘degenerate a form’ as the paperback book. Don was one of the fathers of the entire paperback industry, since before he spearheaded the Ace line he was the originating editor-in-chief of the Avon paperback list in 1945, so he took this personally. He was very offended. He did a little research and discovered a loophole in the copyright. Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien’s American hardcover publisher, had neglected to protect the work in the United States. So, incensed by Tolkien’s response, he realized that he could legally publish them and did»
