What if We Had to Wait Seven More Years?

According to The Writer's Almanac, the sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit arrived in stores on this day in 1954.

It took the great author seventeen years to write The Lord of the Rings. Any anticipation or buzz The Hobbit had created in 1937 must have completely dissipated by the time The Fellowship of the Ring was published. It's hard to picture Tolkien, or any other writer, being able to do that today.

Can you imagine if J.K. Rowling had done that? What if she had published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in 1997 and then told the public they could look forward to reading all six exciting sequels some time in 2014?

The news probably wouldn't have gone over so well. Her publishers would likely have sued her. Pottermania, if it were ever to develop, would have been postponed by at least a decade.

On the upside, so many people would have lost interest by then that there wouldn't be idiots photographing individual pages of the books and posting them on the web. There also wouldn't be newspapers printing spoilers in the form of reviews mere days before the official release.

On the downside, if there was still any profit to be made from movie sequels in 2014, Daniel Radcliffe would have had to portray a 12-year-old Potter when he was 25. By the time they filmed the last movie, he'd be 35. Just imagining the world overrun with Harry Potter: 90210 jokes is enough to make me glad we don't have to wait seven more years.