Two Forgotten Draft Post Stories

Today's post is a little different.

Back in early June of this year I received a fourth copy of John Gardner's "Icebreaker" in the mail featuring a skull on the cover.  I started writing the blog post below and then found yet another variant cover online and quickly purchased it.  Four copies became five.  This meant the post below became redundant and was saved as a draft only.  The story of these five covers published by Coronet and Coronet-General in the 1980's can be found here in the post that was finally released.

I've now re-opened this draft post and published some of what I originally wrote.  Any duplicated text copied to the other post has been deleted however I forgot two stories here which others may also find interesting.

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Firstly, here's two photos I was going to include when I received the fourth copy.  It shows all the different cover variations of this paperback I owned at the time:

Story 1:

In a recent post in the James Bond Collectable Books Worldwide group on Facebook a collector named Ian S. commented that he'd recently added a paperback copy of John Gardner's "Icebreaker" to his collection.  The cover image he included was this one:

I decided to contact him with "Hi Ian, I liked your recent post on the 'vampire' Icebreaker and then realised I didn't have a copy myself !  I have 3 different covers of this book but not a Coronet-General one matching yours.  Thanks to eBay I was able to remedy that situation this morning.  Thanks for the post, cheers Baz"

He responded with "You're welcome! It was thanks to your Piz Gloria website that I even knew of the alternative cover in the 1st place. I got one a couple of years ago, and thought the price on this one was too good to pass up. Then I realised it wasn't a sticker on the cover and double checked Piz Gloria to see if it was there.

Also, it's interesting that the distributed mark is in a different place."  He also added that "You have probably already noticed that the Canadian copy has the title in blue while the UK  edition is metallic."  He then sent this image:

Story 2:

After I'd purchased the similar copy on eBay, with the light blue title text, I asked the seller to please send the book well packaged so it didn't get damaged in transit.  She replied "I keep bubble wrap in business.  Will keep it well protected for the trip.  This book was my Dad's; he would have loved the idea of it going to Australia.  Enjoy"

"Icebreaker" Paperback Cover Variations

Back in 1983 when UK publisher Coronet released John Gardner's third James Bond adventure in paperback format the cover featured a white skull on a black background.

Initially I thought all first paperback printings had exactly the same cover, but several years ago I read John Cox's The Book Bond during a discussion he'd had with Dan Gale and discovered there was a slight variant cover.  This cover is now known as the "white fangs variant" and can be seen as a white area in both corners of the mouth of the skull.  

In the photo below the left is the "white fangs variant" while the copy on the right is the standard version.

At the same time as Coronet published these books in the UK, they were also published in Canada as Coronet - General Books.  Recently I discovered exactly the same printing variation occurred there too.  And two weeks ago I received one of the copies in the mail.  Here are the same covers from Coronet - General Books.

And just when I thought I had all variations of this cover a fellow James Bond book collector, Ian S., sent me a message explaining he'd found another variant.  I managed to find the same cover for sale online and last week this copy arrived in the mail.  As you can see below the title text for this variant cover on the left is a light blue colour.  While the cover on the right (a duplicated cover from above just for reference purposes) is the usual metallic title text.  Again this is a Coronet - General Books printing.

Surely these are all the different cover variations of this printing of "Icebreaker"... but I'm not holding my breath !

Coronet Movie Tie-In Variants

Back in 1995 when "Goldeneye" premiered at the cinemas I purchased the accompanying Coronet movie tie-in paperback by John Gardner.  A few months later I noticed the same MTI paperback on the shelves but this time Bruce Feirstein's name was given credit on the cover for the screenplay the book was based on.

Roll forward to 1999 and it turns out exactly the same issue occurred again, but somehow I didn't realise until last week when I discovered a second version of the Coronet paperback by Raymond Benson for "The World Is Not Enough" for sale online.  Today I received this second version in the mail.

This version also gave credit to Bruce Feirstein for the screenplay where it was missing on the first edition.

Strange how this issue could occur twice in four years.