Garner sent his debut novel to the publishing company Collins, where it was picked up by the company's head, Sir William Collins, who was on the look out for new fantasy novels following on from the recent commercial and critical success of J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" (1954–55). Garner, who went on to become a personal friend of Collins, would later relate that "Billy Collins saw a title with funny-looking words in it on the stockpile, and he decided to publish it." On its release in 1960, "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" proved to be a critical and commercial success, later being described as "a tour de force of the imagination, a novel that showed almost every writer who came afterwards what it was possible to achieve in novels ostensibly published for children." Garner himself however would later denounce this novel as "a fairly bad book" in 1968.