life and times of the author. Meanwhile, the author himself rejected an allegorical reading of his work. This tension can help introduce readers to "readerly" and "writerly" interpretations, to tenets of New Criticism, and critical tools from Freudian analysis, such as sublimation, in approaching literary works. Another approach to critique taken in the classroom has been to propose the insignificance of female characters in the story as sexist. While Bilbo may be seen as a literary symbol of "small folk" of any gender, a gender-conscious approach can help students establish notions of a "socially symbolic text" where meaning is generated by tendentious readings of a given work. By this interpretation, it is ironic that the first authorized adaptation was a stage production in a girls' school. Adaptations The Hobbit has been adapted many times for a variety of media, starting with a March 1953 stage production by St. Margaret's School, Edinburgh. The first motion picture adaptation of The Hobbit was Gene Deitch's 1966 short film of cartoon stills. In 1968, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an 8-part radio drama version by Michael Kilgarriff. In 1977, Rankin/Bass made an animated film based on the book. In 1978, Romeo Muller won a Peabody Award for his "execrable" and "confusing" teleplay. A children's opera composed by Dean Burry appeared in 2004 in Toronto. Between 2012 and 2014, Peter Jackson's three-part live-action film version appeared on cinema screens. Several computer and video games have been based on the story, including a 1982 game by Beam Software. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Andy Serkis read the whole of The Hobbit to raise money for charity. He then recorded the work again as an audiobook, with cover art by Alan Lee. Collectors' market While reliable figures are difficult to obtain, estimated global sales of The Hobbit run between 35 and 100 million copies since 1937. In the UK The Hobbit has not retreated from the top 5,000 bestselling books measured by Nielsen BookScan since 1998, when the index began, achieving a three-year sales peak rising from 33,084 (2000) to 142,541 (2001), 126,771 (2002) and 61,229 (2003), ranking it at the 3rd position in Nielsen's "Evergreen" book list. The enduring popularity of The Hobbit makes early printings of the book attractive collectors' items. The first printing of the first English-language edition can sell for between £6,000 and £20,000 at auction, although the price for a signed first edition has