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In addition to being the prolific father of fantasy literature (and making his name into a symbol decades before Prince did), Tolkien was also a pretty-legit illustrator... So, if anyone gets the okay to gripe about cover illustrations, and walk around in a tattered robe cursing in Elfish, it's him.
Here's a quote from a letter he wrote to Raynor Unwin (from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien) after Ballantine's American paperback of The Hobbit was released in '65 with Barbara Remington's dubious illustrations of lions and 'pumpkins'
"I wrote to [Ballantine] expressing (with moderation) my dislike of the cover for The Hobbit. It was a short hasty note by hand, without a copy, but it was to this effect: I think the cover ugly; but I recognize that a main object of a paperback cover is to attract purchasers, and I suppose that you are better judges of what is attractive in USA than I am. I therefore will not enter into a debate about taste - (meaning though I did not say so: horrible colours and foul lettering) - but I must ask this about the vignette: what has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why a lion and emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs? [ed. - he would later call them "pumpkins"] I do not understand how anybody who had read the tale (I hope you are one) could think such a picture would please the author. ..."
It's a good question ? and he was right to ask it. Remington never got a chance to read the books and "didn't know what they were about" when she designed the Hobbit cover, as she said in an interview with Andwerve.
After the first five editions of the paperback, as noted by the Tolkein Library, Ballantine finally removed the lion. The pumpkins and emus, however, stayed.
