Croatian

The stories of Croatian A and Croatian B are intertwined at the start.  They started with a purchase on the Croatian ebay-like site Njuškalo of FR of Croatian A and TT and RK of Croatian B from a single seller, Anita Majstorović Gaži of Zagreb because no seller was offering a complete set of either the hardbacks (Croatian A) or the paperbacks (Croatian B).  The publisher, Algoritam, has gone out of business so Njuškalo and similar sites in Europe (and a small number outside Europe like ABEBooks) are the only places to find Gospodar Prstenova in Croatian.  So in early 2018 I had one-third of Croatian A and two-thirds of Croatian B.  Now the stories diverge.

Ideally, it should have been possible to purchase individual copies of TT and RK, but while it was easy to find sellers with TT, no one was selling RK and no one was selling the full set of three.  Toward the end of the year, Zinaida Biro, an on-line book seller of Narta, offered a full set on Njuškalo.  I immediately contacted her to see if she would sell them to me.  (It is often necessary on these European sites to contact the seller directly by email because the sites themselves do not always accept international financial transactions or ship internationally.)  She was a little suspicious of my interest in the books at first so she asked me to send her a photo of my collection to prove that I was, indeed, a Tolkien collector.  I did and we struck up an email exchange during which I told her I really only needed TT and RK, but was willing to buy the whole set.  She was happy to sell me just the two volumes I needed (and she sold the third later individually).  She has since been a part of my purchases of both Serbian B and Macedonian.

The stories of Croatian A and Croatian B are intertwined at the start (see above).  Acquiring FR of Croatian B was a much simpler story than that of Croatian A.  In this case I simply ordered a single copy of FR from a seller on Njuškalo and completed the set.