Neckless and proofless?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

While reading The Hobbit this weekend, I was struck by an occurrence of 'neckless' for 'necklace'.

'I beg of you,' said Bilbo stammering and standing on one foot, 'to accept this gift!' and he brought out a neckless of silver and pearls that Dain had given him at their parting

If Tolkien had put it there, clearly there would have to be an explanation for such a use, so naturally I cross-referenced the copy I was reading with my other copies. I found that two of them have this error, but that three others do not.

What makes this interesting is that the copy in which I first found the mistake was a fourth impression of the fourth edition (George Allen and Unwin, 1983) and the only copy that duplicated it was a 1978 Guild Publishing edition that is identical to the GA&U edition even down to the pagination. However, I have an old Unwin Paperbacks copy of The Hobbit from 1983 (a late impression of a 1975 paperback edition) that does not contain the mistake. How, I wonder, did a mistake like that get into such a late edition?

I would be very interested to know if this was a mistake in the typesetting for the Allen and Unwin fourth edition, and for how many impressions and in which editions it continued. It seems clear that the mistake was not present in any copies before 1978, but I hope that the rest of you can confirm this from your own libraries.

[Mithalwen]

I am not technologically aware enough to know but when did they start to move from physically typesetting books and doing it on computers. It does seem like something that slipped passed a spell checker.

[blantyr]

Not sure if it's relevant, but 'neckless' seems to be a valid word according to my on line dictionary and spell checker... That would make it an editing whoopsie, rather than the computer's fault?

[Mithalwen]

That is what I meant - because it is a real world it wouldn't have been picked up by a spell checker. I have been doing genealogical research lately and mistranscriptions of the indexes into the databases are a nightmare. But unlike someone turning Diana to Deana and Doris to Davis in a list, you would hope that this error would have been spotted by a proofreader.

[Morthoron]

Well, Bilbo did get the necklace from Dain, a dwarf. And since dwarves are, by their very nature, stubby and stout, perhaps this was a Freudian slip on Bilbo's part, using the term "neckless" as an allusion to squat dwarves lacking a neck beneath their billowing beards. For a dwarf, it would not be a "necklace", but more of a...ummm..."chestlace".

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

A tempting hypothesis. I'd have expected Tolkien's edition of the Red Book to have at least a footnote about that, though.

Originally Posted by mithalwen

I am not technologically aware enough to know but when did they start to move from physically typesetting books and doing it on computers.

Apparently around 1962. By 1978 they were on the second generation of phototypesetting machines. This probably was a computer error, but I still checked every reference book I have looking for an alternative or dialect spelling of 'necklace'.