John Gardner Sniper Series Purchase

One of my favourite John Gardner - James Bond paperback series is the Sniper series, named because of the sniper sight that appears on each book cover.  When this set was published by Coronet Books in the UK around 1986, Mr Gardner had only completed the five titles which are included: "Licence Renewed" (white cover), "For Special Services" (red cover), "Icebreaker" (black cover), "Role Of Honour" (blue cover) and "Nobody Lives For Ever" (teal cover).  

Meanwhile in Canada, General Books (linked to Coronet in the UK) concurrently published this series.  The covers of each title by General were almost identical to the Coronet printings, except strangely for "Nobody Lives For Ever" which had a red colour cover instead of teal.  So while there are five titles in this series there are six different covers to collect.

I've previously written a post about this series when I purchased a second Coronet copy of "Nobody Lives For Ever".   Today's post is inspired by the purchase of a second copy of "For Special Services".  It's not in quite as good condition as my current copy, but it's unread with a lovely condition cover and at just $16 it was hard to refuse.

Now I have two titles of a second series of this lovely set.

Three Capes To My Collection

Recently while my parents were travelling through rural Victoria they perchanced upon a small second-hand book store.  Inside they found several Jonathan Cape - Ian Fleming first edition hardbacks for sale.  They quickly rang me to discuss their finds and upon leaving several minutes later had in their possession a first edition "Octopussy And The Living Daylights" from 1966 and a reprint "From Russia With Love" from 1965.  Both have lovely original dust jackets.  

During the same week I also encountered a first edition "The Man With The Golden Gun" from 1965 going cheap at another second-hand book store

Three Jonathan Cape - James Bond novels in one week is highly unusual for me, especially in such good condition.  So it was certainly a great week for my James Bond literary collection.  The three Richard Chopping dust jackets still look fantastic too.

A New Purchase

I purchased Kim Sherwood's "A Spy Like Me" last week.  This is the same paperback I wrote about in my last post.  The cover is great and it sits well with the paperback edition of "Double Or Nothing".   I'll be adding the cover image to PizGloria.com shortly.

I purchased this copy from "Thesaurus Books".  It was great to finally visit this Brighton store again.  Good to see it was full of lots of customers too.

I also visited "Top Titles" located on the opposite side of Church Street.  This lovely store always has a large range of recent titles on a wide variety of categories.

The final store I visited was "Avenue Books" in Elsternwick.  This is another great independent book store to get lost in.