New Line Cinema issued a series of hardback pressbooks, all of which are highly sought after by collectors.

The Fellowship of the Ring pressbook was published privately, to be distributed to members of the press and favored guests at the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, in 2001.

This event marked the first time any film footage had been viewed outside production. New Line rented a theatre in Cannes, for a private showing of twenty minutes of film footage...the Mines of Moria sequence. There had been much speculation about what the relatively unknown New Zealand production team were up to, whether New Line had made a horrible mistake entrusting so much money to those quarters, and whether the Kiwis were up to the task. The footage put all that to rest, and the resulting PR buzz must have been intoxicating.

This hardback, linen (or grasscloth) bound book has 60 glossy pages in it, and includes short bios of every major cast and crew members, lots of production stats, and dozens of full color photos.

There is no ISBN number, since it was privately published, never intended for sale to the public.

Editions have been found in English, French, and Spanish. I only know of one example in Spanish, and am lucky enough to count it in my personal collection. Text appears to be the same from language to language.

English books have also been reported being distributed with a handfull of press kits in Britain. I do not believe any were distributed to the American press, unless they were in attendance at Cannes.

I do not know the size of the publication run on this book. There was a seller who was bragging at one time that there were less than a hundred, but that is complete bullhockey. I would guesstimate that the production run on the FOTR book was probably a thousand or less.   (The Two Towers is the rarest, and the Return of the King the most "common", although all are hard to find and were never sold directly to the public.)

I have always been puzzled why there was not an edition published in German, since the Germans are rabid Tolkien fans. If anyone has run acrost one, I would surely appreciate it if you'd drop me an email.