Interview with Pieter Collier

Can you describe us your "adventure" with Tolkien literature? How (and when) did it start, and in what way (if any) has it changed your life?

The adventure started very early on as a kid. I was lucky enough to have an elder brother who was interested into role-playing games and he introduced me to the world of Tolkien when I was still a kid. I don´t recall the exact year, but I still remember the first time I read the Hobbit (in Dutch). At age eleven I read the Lord of the Rings for the first time and I was hooked right away. It was much later that I discovered that I actually had been reading in a first edition of the Dutch translation and this set is still in my collection today. While lacking the dust jackets, it is one of my biggest treasures because it was the set where it all started. Reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time is something you can remember for the rest of your life. It was impossible to stop reading and I remember lying under the covers of my bed with a flashlight following the adventure chapter-by-chapter, unable to stop reading. Since then I must have re-read the books over 50 times and I still enjoy re-reading them today. From the first time I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings I wanted to own a copy, probably to be able to re-read the books whenever I wished to and somehow the collecting had started without I was aware of it. It must have been around that age that I also wanted to find out more about the man behind the books. Once I discovered Tolkien had written other works as well I also wanted to read them and in a short period of time I had collected the major works by Tolkien.