QUEENSTOWN, NEW ZEALAND — Queenstown has a powerful international flavor. Stop and listen on the streets and you are as likely to hear a language from Europe or Asia as English and even that comes in several flavors: Kiwi, Aussie, British with the occasional Yank thrown in.
It is a city of tourists that include backpackers and couples in retirement years soaking up all the world has to offer including the incredible scenery of the amazing Queenstown by Lake Wakatipu. This is great of course, but young travelers and those in the golden years aren’t the best demographics for movie collectibles.
So it might surprise some to find Hugh Clark and Sarah Dobson carving out a niche with high-end items made by the likes of Weta Workshop and Sideshow Collectibles at their Reel Collectibles shop. But there they are in the Queenstown Mall on Beach St., selling superhero items, Lord of the Rings stuff (a given in that part of the world) and Star Wars swag. Expect an avalanche of Hobbit stuff when the films hit the world a year from now. Continue reading “Reel Collectibles keeps fandom alive in Queenstown”
At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.” More..
As we excitedly reported last week, HarperCollins Publishers have released an Enhanced eBook version of ‘The Hobbit.’ Today, for your viewing pleasure, we have the full press release about this new digital release. You can read it below. As before, if you’d like to download your own copy it is available from their Facebook Tolkien eBook Store, Apple’s iBookstore, Kindle and Nook. Enjoy!
HarperCollins Publishers Releases Enhanced eBook of The Hobbit
David Brawn, Publisher of Estates at HarperCollins, said: “It is customary for publishers to release new editions of books to commemorate milestone anniversaries, and as we entered The Hobbit’s 75th year, we felt we should acknowledge its success not only in print but also in the eBook world. Many thousands of readers have embraced The Hobbit in the two years since it was first released as an eBook, and with the growing availability of color-enabled devices, we felt it was time to offer an alternative edition, complete with Tolkien’s color pictures from our popular Deluxe edition. Together with J.R.R. Tolkien’s now famous half-hour recording of Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, the recent discovery of three further unreleased extracts – one long and two short – meant we have been able to enhance the eBook even further. At a time when there is so much speculation about how others are visualizing The Hobbit, it is rather special to be able to read the novel with Tolkien’s own pictures and with parts of it read in his own voice, for a truly authentic experience.” Continue reading “Official Release: HarperCollins Publishers Releases Enhanced eBook of The Hobbit”
From digitalspy.ca: The final movie in the Harry Potter series has become the most pre-ordered film or TV product of all time on the UK arm of Amazon, beating the long-standing record of Mamma Mia!. Amazon said today that pre-orders for the DVD and Blu-ray release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 are more than double those achieved by Part 1. Continue reading “Boy Wizard Beats LOTR For Amazon Pre-Order Record”
QUEENSTOWN, NEW ZEALAND — Queenstown has a powerful international flavor. Stop and listen on the streets and you are as likely to hear a language from Europe or Asia as English and even that comes in several flavors: Kiwi, Aussie, British with the occasional Yank thrown in.
As we excitedly reported last week, HarperCollins Publishers have released an