Mr Bliss, a man notable for his immensely tall hats and for the girabbit in his garden, takes the whimsical decision to buy a motor car. But his first drive to visit friends quickly becomes a catalogue of disasters…

J.R.R. Tolkien invented and illustrated the book of Mr Bliss’s adventures for his own children when they were very young. The book was handwritten with lots of detailed and uproarious colour pictures.

This is a complete and highly imaginative tale of eccentricity. Some of the disasters that befall Mr Bliss could be blamed on his style of driving, but even he could not anticipate being hijacked by three bears. As for what happened next – the readers, whether young or old, will want to discover for themselves.

Republished in hardback to match his Letters from Father Christmas and other illustrated Tolkien editions, Mr Bliss is presented as a conventional illustrated storybook, and also with Tolkien’s handwritten pages in facsimile at the back, and is sure to delight Tolkien fans of all ages.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

It is a peculiarly British slice of history that our greatest works of fantasy should have emerged from a group of academics sitting in a smoke-filled local pub. The group was, of course, the Inklings and the pub was the Eagle and Child (known colloquially as the Bird and Baby) in Oxford. The group included the bard of myth and children’s fable Roger Lancelyn Green, the creator of Narnia, C.S. Lewis and, perhaps most famously of all, the Lord of Middle Earth himself, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings.