Yes -- I have McIlwaine's book too, not yet out of its shrinkwrap -- saving it for a special moment.
I don't know how interested you are in C. S. Lewis -- someone to whom Tolkien's readers must always be grateful because Tolkien said he'd never have finished
LotR if not for his encouragement.
I did a comparison once with Lewis's library (CSL died 1963; the library was catalogue for a 1969 paper by Margaret Rogers) and the releases of the famous Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (1969-1974). A remarkable degree of overlap, especially if you omit Lin Carter's original anthologies for the series, the few books that were not reprints (e.g. the Katherine Kurtz books), and the books by Weird Tales authors Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft. Some of the books in Lewis's library were, I'm sure, ones that his American-born wife brought to the marriage. I'd guess she was the James Branch Cabell fan. I posted this on Chrons a while back:
------De Camp and Pratt's Land of Unreason is one of a bunch of books Lewis owned that were to be reprinted in 1969-1974, when Tolkien's American paperback publisher, Ballantine, cast about for additional material for the fantasy market. Lewis's library and the approximately 60 titles of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, edited by Lin Carter, both include William Beckford's Vathek, five James Branch Cabell books, Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, F. Marion Crawford's Khaled, Roger Lancelyn Green's From the World's End (the Ballantine edition was called Double Phoenix and included a work by another author), Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang's The World's Desire, Haggard's The People of the Mist, William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (two volumes as printed in the Ballantine series), George MacDonald's Phantastes and Lilith (also some shorter MacDonald fantasies, gathered by Lin Carter for a book called Evenor), George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat, Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, and William Morris's The Water of the Wondrous Isles and The Wood Beyond the World. (Interestingly, Morris's The Well at the World's End, praised by Lewis, was not in the 1969 catalogue of his library. Perhaps he owned a copy that was later acquired by someone as a keepsake. The Well was reprinted by Ballantine in two volumes.) Also, the Lewis library included eleven titles by Lord Dunsany, an author mined for six Adult Fantasy releases. Richard Hodgens, a member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, translated a portion of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (“Vol. 1: The Ring of Angelica”), the whole of which Lewis read in the original Italian. The Lewis book collection also included fantasy by Mervyn Peake, E. R. Eddison, and David Lindsay that Ballantine reprinted just before the launching of the Adult Fantasy series proper. Lin Carter would have been impressed by Lewis’s collection. Most of the material reprinted in Carter's series that Lewis did not own belonged to the American Weird Tales magazine tradition (e.g. four volumes of stories by Clark Ashton Smith) or had never been published before (e.g. Sanders Anne Laubenthal's somewhat Charles Williams-y Excalibur or Joy Chant's somewhat Lewisian-Tolkienian Red Moon and Black Mountain).
The Lewis library catalogue lists two other books by the co-author of Land of Unreason. The Well of the Unicorn (1948) is listed as by G[eorge]. U. Fletcher - - the pseudonym used for this book by Fletcher Pratt. Pratt's World of Wonder (1951) is an anthology. Such gatherings of science fiction and fantasy stories were then uncommon publishers’ fare, although the Lewis library included two of the earliest ones, Strange Ports of Call (1948), edited by August Derleth, and Donald A. Wollheim’s Pocket Book of Science Fiction (1943).-----
Lewis's library included numerous books by Lord Dunsany, Rider Haggard, and others. It included a collection of Arthur Machen's major stories, etc. It should be noted that some of the books in Lewis's collection (like Please Don't Eat the Daisies!) probably came to be there thanks to his American-born wife (and fellow science fiction fan) Joy Davidman Gresham.
.........All this is sort of a tangent to the news that a list of TOLKIEN's library is to be released. I'm wondering how the list was compiled. Tolkien was much, much less given than Lewis, to writing about his current reading, so far as I know. There are not very many gleanings in the Tolkien letters, whereas CSL is always writing about what he's reading. Tolkien made a list of his books in the 1930s for insurance purposes, so perhaps that was a resource, but he lived around 40 more years!
