Bond Presents For Christmas

Yesterday was Christmas Day and I was lucky to receive the two items below as presents from my wife. 

Both items were purchased from sellers in the U.S. and fortunately were well packed for their journey to Australia.

The first was a poster from Penguin promoting the Richie Fahey series from 2008 celebrating the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth.  It's linked to this series of books.

The second poster was created in 1982 by Putnam/Berkley to promote the simultaneous release of John Gardner's - James Bond continuation novels "For Special Services" in hardback and "Licence Renewed" in paperback.

I haven't seen the poster above before, nor could I find another copy anywhere else on the web, however I did find the following image below from the fantastic website/blog The Book Bond by John Cox which looks very similar.  All credit to John for this image.

Promotional material for Bond novels is difficult to find, especially in Australia.  I'm lucky to have these two items in my collection now thanks to my wife.  Well, to be perfectly honest, I did purchase them and then asked if she wanted to give them to me as a present for Christmas... but I'm sure I'm not alone here as a collector.

William Boyd's " Solo" Book Variant

I spend a lot of time searching for James Bond paperback cover variants online and in secondhand book stores.  Recently I've been concentrating on Coronet cover variations which I'll include in a later post.  As I was going through my Coronet books the other day I realised I didn't need to go too far to find my latest variant... it was already sitting on a shelf in my bookcase.

In April this year my wife and I visited the annual Yarragon book fair where I purchased "three unread paperbacks that were a bargain at just $1 each to add to my doubles box".   One was a copy of William Boyd's "Solo" published by Vintage in 2014.  The other day I finally noticed the size of this paperback differed from another copy of the same novel.  Perhaps other collectors were already aware but this paperback came in two sizes.  Here's the two books with their size difference:

I'm going to add this cover to the "Solo" page on my website soon however as the covers look almost identical it's going to be hard to differentiate between them on the screen.  But as seen in the photos above they have different barcodes and ISBN's.   I wonder if there are other book variations on my shelves still waiting to be discovered ?  I hope so.