[The] Silmarillion. Stockholm: AWE/Gebers. Ny Upplaga, 1987. Printed in GB (Clays).

I was intrigued, recently, to encounter a 1987 edition of The Silmarillion published in Sweden by AWE/Gebers, but printed in the UK by RICHARD CLAY (of Bungay). 

Swedish New Edition (1987) copyright page

At present I have catalogued it thus:

[THE] SILMARILLION 

Stockholm: AWE/Gebers New Ed. 1987 Hb 1st imp.

Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay

By the 1970–80s developments in photo-typesetting, followed by digital typesetting, had likely swept away any lingering logistical problems associated with the physical separation of typesetting and printing. RICHARD CLAY—who had printed the 1978 BOOK CLUB ASSOCIATES edition of The Silmarillion in the UK—were probably only responsible for the printing (and binding) of this edition; but it is not impossible they also had a role in the book's typesetting. 

Swedish First Edition (1979) copyright page

The first Swedish edition, published by AWE/Gebers in 1979, had been both printed and published in Sweden; a potted history of CLAYS I'll leave for another day. But what we have here is a Swedish-language edition published in Sweden, but printed and bound in England. 

[L] Swedish New Edition (1987) — Swedish First Edition (1979) [R]

Clouded by anglo-centric views on publishing arrangements generally—for example, the more dominant (and more prominently discussed) historical distribution practice of UK books being exported abroad, an entire other topic—I have to admit I hadn't really given much thought to the idea of a non-UK publisher, publishing Tolkien in translation, utilising a UK company for the printing of their own edition. My only real observation of this geographical-national separation of printing-publishing was of the reverse: of UK publishers out-sourcing printing abroad. For whatever reason, I believed this to be a specifically British publishing phenomenon, based on the historical dominance of British (English-language) publishing and publishers, and the subservient role of the printer in the publishing process generally. 

In more recent publishing times the latter practice would seem (anecdotally) to have become much more common; it is not unusual to have a book in-hand printed in, for example, China, but published and sold in the UK. In the world of Tolkien book-collecting, specifically, any number of recent HARPERCOLLINS releases will illustrate this practice. Editions printed (and bound) in Europe are commonplace. 

This isn't, of course, new. An earlier example of this is the Ted Nasmith (first) illustrated edition of The Silmarillion (1998), published in the UK by HARPERCOLLINS and printed in Italy by ROTOLITO LOMBARDA. However, I'm genuinely not familiar enough with non-UK publishing practices to understand whether printing abroad (country B) and published at home (country A)—like we see here with this 1987 UK-printed/Swedish-published edition of The Silmarillion—is commonplace or not. For another massive English-language country like the US, I can absolutely believe this all sounds quite familiar. But for elsewhere, publishing in translation?

Where books are printed is certainly something one sees widely commented upon (online) in respect to Tolkien book-collecting; I think it also fair to say that it would seem to be overrepresented in discussions of modern editions in particular. It is not, though, without interest, and can throw up curious oddities which challenge conventional understanding of bibliographical concepts like edition, impression, issue, state, etc. Or, at the very least, these sometimes convoluted—and frequently opaque and difficult to establish—book manufacturing practices, can make some of this more complicated to discuss and document. 

A topic, I think, for further (deeper) research and consideration.

 

Also on SILMARILLION MINUTIAE

❆ Das Silmarillion: Three Editions from the 1980s