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.

------------------------------------------------------------------

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"

Coronet Sniper Series Replacement

The first paperback printing of John Gardner's fifth James Bond adventure "Nobody Lives For Ever" was published by Coronet in 1986.  The cover features an image of a sniper sight aiming at a boat and a silhouette of Bond in front of "007" text.  

As the years have passed I've realised this printing is not very common.  It may have even had a limited release only in the UK as I never saw this edition for sale in new bookstores here in Australia back in the 1980's.  I only discovered this cover existed in the late 1990's.  

There were few websites displaying James Bond book covers back then, especially continuation novels.  And online websites selling books wasn't anywhere as big as it is today.  Finding this cover in a second-hand book store was a real surprise, especially as there were already four other titles with matching covers in my collection.  Those titles were reprints of the first four of Gardner's Bond adventures; "Licence Renewed" (white), ""For Special Services" (red), "Icebreaker" (black) and "Role Of Honour" (dark blue).   For want of a name I called these covers the Coronet Sniper Series.

Now I'm pretty picky.  The original copy I found wasn't in great condition compared to the other four I had in my series and it's always been a bugbear of mine.  It's taken a long time but recently I found and purchased a replacement copy.  Here's the two of them together.  The copy on the right is the new one.  It has a couple of texta marks on the back cover hiding the printed price but the spine is lovely and overall the copy appears unread.

And here's the new copy with the other four in the series.  The last copy, with the red cover, is the same title published by Coronet-General in Canada.  I still have no idea why they changed the colour from light blue/teal to red in Canada, especially as "For Special Services" was already printed in red, but it's an added bonus of this series.

Finally, this is the card that accompanied the book from the overseas seller.  I like these extra details from sellers.