who the hell numbers books like this?

[gaijinkaiju]

Picked up the Lord of the rings trilogy awhile ago, but it wasn't till recently i noticed the bizarre page numbering system it has.
First book makes sense. Starts on page 1, ends on page 407.
But then the second book starts on 413, ends on 744.
And then finally the third book starts at 747, ends on 1031 but also includes an extra 145 pages of appendixes and an index that has page references for the first two books.
Why?
Why not just include the relevant appendices and and an index in each separate book?

 

[Battousai]

The thing about the index and appendixes is because Tolkien envisioned the whole thing as a gigantic tome that was to be published all together, hence all that stuff appearing at the very end of the thing. Also in terms of division of work, he considered the story to be divided into 6 volumes. What happened was that his publisher and no other publisher really was willing to publish it in a single tome because of the costs and because it was simply huge. So Tolkien dropped that and went with the 6 book angle because he was afraid the book would never be published if he kept insisting on one book, but then again publishers were unwilling because at the time paper supplies were still recovering from World War II and the publisher wanted to minimize the publishing costs in case it wasn't successful but they were forced to print all the books because of the publishing contract.

So they resolved to divide it into 3 books each with 2 volumes of the story each, which was a bit of a jumbled mess because of how Tolkien had devised the whole thing and how the publisher simply chopped it up at places.

 

[gaijinkaiju]

The thing about the index and appendixes is because Tolkien envisioned the whole thing as a gigantic tome that was to be published all together,

yeah..that makes sense. It does feel like it should've been one giant tome but i can see how that might not be appealing to everyone

 

[Arnox]

You think that's bad, I hear some books don't even tell you on the cover which book in sequence it is in the series.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

You think that's bad, I hear some books don't even tell you on the cover which book in sequence it is in the series.

I have some of those, yeah. They usually say it on the inside then. Page 1 or 3 (maybe 5 for the extra annoying ones).

 

[Battousai]

You think that's bad, I hear some books don't even tell you on the cover which book in sequence it is in the series.

Oh yeah, that reminds that when I first picked up the Lord of the Rings back when I was 16, I started with The 2 Towers and was confused as hell as why it was beginning like that. I simply didn't read the second page of the book itself where it said it was the second part of the whole thing along with some other intro stuff since I just wanted to get into the story.