James Bond books are forever

Joseph Connolly got hooked on 007 when he was 12 and has been busy collecting the novels - from paperbacks to first editions - ever since. Here he provides a bookworm's guide

I have yet to meet a man, certainly one of my vintage, who does not remember, with awe and a shiver of something not quite understood, the first time that - pop-eyed and with tingling fingers - he turned the pages of a James Bond novel. I used to gaze with longing at the racy paperback covers and inhale the very pages.

Casino Royale, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, The Man With The Golden Gun

The joke is, I was about 12 and I didn't know what was going on, half the time. Why did 007 like his drink shaken, and why didn't it then spill all over the place? Why was that drink never ever Tizer, when he could obviously afford gallons of it? And why did he always seem so keen on sharing a room with a - huh! - girl, when he could easily have had one all to himself? And talking of girls… well, those two-and-sixpenny Pan paperback covers, they were more Mickey Spillane than anything, and the women, crumbs, they tended to look like Gina Lollobrigida, though with added pout. For a lad who had come direct from Jennings and Darbishire, this was indeed hot and perplexing stuff.

I soon gathered all of those paperbacks, envying from afar the latest unaffordable hardback with its classy Richard Chopping dust jacket. Years later, I began to amass a hardback set (Ian Fleming had died in 1964, so completeness was achievable) and then I hit on the idea of collecting them all in first editions - an idea that struck the rather staid rare-books world as at best futile, if not perverse. Even by the late 1970s one could gather all of the Bond titles, bar the first three, for only a few pounds each. Those first three - Casino Royale, Live and Let Die and Moonraker - were scarce for the simple reason that so few had been printed and in those days half the modest print run of 3,000 or 4,000 would go straight to public libraries and be lost to the future world of collecting.

These days Bond is about as collectable as you can get. Here, I give an indication of what a fine copy in its original dust jacket would fetch today. The jacket is all-important. That of Casino Royale is legendarily rare, and five years ago one fetched more than £13,000 at auction; that's just the jacket - there was no accompanying book. Caveat emptor, however: in the jargon of the book-collecting world, this was a 'first state' jacket. A 'second state' jacket, carrying a quote from a Sunday newspaper review on the front inside flap, sold in the same year for just £600. The values for all the books given here are slashed to shreds if there is no jacket. For instance: a fine, jacketed Goldfinger? Maybe £800. Without jacket? £30, and hard to sell.

I wonder sometimes whether the last generation or so, bludgeoned by the films, are even aware that these good-humoured (but never comical) novels exist. Well they do, and they are wonderful: read them.

CASINO ROYALE (1953)

The original, and in many ways the best: the raw secret agent, at his purest. James Bond, 37 years old - now, and (like diamonds) forever - is sent to the casino in Royale-les-Eaux to out-gamble a deadly Russian agent, Le Chiffre. To his fury, Bond is ordered to work with a female associate, who forms the dark subplot. The torture scene is hideously unforgettable, while the car is a battleship-grey supercharged Bentley. For Vesper Lynd, the beauty dressed in black velvet, 007 creates a cocktail, the Vesper; although Bourbon is his drink of choice, not vodka martinis.

LIVE AND LET DIE (1954)

Bond is up against the black gangster Mr Big, not just a top operative for SMERSH (a contraction of smyert spionam, Russian for 'death to spies') but also lord of a voodoo cult. He has a sadistic sidekick called Tee-Hee, who titters character-istically as he breaks Bond's finger. The action moves from Harlem to Jamaica's Shark Bay, by way of Florida Keys. Then there is Solitaire: 'One of the most beautiful women Bond had ever seen.' As well as destroying Mr Big, 007 must rescue Solitaire from his domination, though not before facing a barracuda.

MOONRAKER (1955)

The British Secret Service operates abroad, but here we have the only book set in England - Kent, to be precise. Sir Hugo Drax is apparently a public-spirited multi-millionaire eager to devote his stock of Columbite to building the ultimate nuclear rocket, The Moonraker, whose range will deter Britain's aggressors. But M is troubled: Drax is a member of his club, Blades … and he cheats at cards. Enter 007, who trounces Drax at the card table and discovers that Drax has other plans for The Moonraker. There is also the lovely Gala Brand, probably the most beautiful policewoman in the world, the swell of whose breasts was 'as splendid as Bond had guessed from the measurements on her record sheet'.