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Hidden in plain sight: Dust jacket prices tell you more...

Writer's picture: Peter CrushPeter Crush

Later-priced dust jackets reveal much more detail about a book's publishing history than you might have previously thought:


In book collecting in general, and Ian Fleming book collecting in particular, there's an unwritten rule that says the best books to try and collect are those that have a non-price clipped jacket.

 

There's two big reasons for this. For starters, an unclipped jacket – featuring a very specific price – typically determines whether the jacket they’re looking at is the right one for that book and not a later one that’s been paired with it, masquerading as a first impression jacket. [For more detail on this, see my blogs here and here for more detail].

 

Secondly a non-clipped jacket shows off ALL of the book. It’s complete, and unmolested, and presents as it was originally printed. Unclipped jackets are prized because they didn’t suffer the indignity of have a corner lopped off – normally done by people buying the book as a gift, to hide the price they paid for it.

 

But… altered book prices can tell you much, more more

 

Nine times out of ten collectors want the jacket with a printed price that corresponds to that specific edition, and which hasn't had a later price sticker put over it.


However, for completists, or those that like to collect variations of the same book, there is a very good reason to actively seek out books with later price revisions - typically over-priced stickers.


This is because they can start to tell you an awful lot about the selling-shelf-life of particular titles. Moreover, if you look hard enough, it's likely you can even make a few new discoveries along the way.

 

This blog intends to explain why, by looking at some of the stickers I've seen – and what they tell you about that book’s particular popularity (or maybe that should be unpopularity) .

 

Types of stickers you can find

 

First of all, there’s several 'types' of sticker that you can find on Ian Fleming hardbacks:

 

1) The ‘re-used’ jacket sticker:


Publisher, Jonathan Cape, had a waste-not-want-not approach when it came to reusing jackets for later impressions. Instead of printing a brand new batch of jackets - just for a change of price - it would often first re-use left over jackets from previous impressions and put a sticker over the original price showing the new, updated price.


1962’s The Spy Who Loved Me had a first impression jacket price of 15 shillings, but was in reprint right up until 1980, when the last impression was the 8th printing. On this 1980 jacket the printed price was £4.95. But later stickers, put over already-printed (earlier) jackets reveal how this title continued being sold far beyond 1980. Gilbert notes price stickers going to £9.95 (around 1987).

The example shown left displays the penultimate price of £8.95 (sold around 1986), but it comes from the final 8th print jacket.


On this occasion rather than the sticker going over the original £4.95 price, the price has been clipped off entirely, to remove all trace of the previous price, and the current price sticker has been placed alongside it.


This is also what’s happened with this example of Moonraker – which shows a price sticker of £3.95 – but very clearly placed alongside a snipped off former price. The former (printed on) price was £2.95, as this is an 10th impression jacket (1975). By the time the 11th (and final), impression was printed in 1981, the price on the flap was £5.95. So, this £3.95 price sticker indicates this book was repriced sometime between 1975 and 1981. Gilbert notes that 11th impression books carry stickers with prices of £6.96; £7.95; £8.95 and £9.95 (the latter of which he speculates was around 1987).

 

2) The sticker that denotes a separate ‘issue’

One particular Fleming title sports a sticker that instead of indicating a later impression with an updated price actually references a particular ‘inbetween state’ of book (as I call it) – or ‘issue’ – which can be showcased by 1962's Thunderball.


A first impression (1961) jacket of Thunderball has a printed price of 15s on the jacket. The (1964) second impression jacket for this title has a printed (ie not stickered) price of 16s. But there are examples (see above left) where a first impression book also features an overpriced ‘16s sticker’ on it – seemingly in advance of the official change in price of the official second impression.


This is because there were two ‘issues’ of the first impression – the first being for a selling window of 1961-62 and the second selling between January 1963-October 1964 (see Gilbert p303). Of the total 50,589 first impressions printed, the first 41,000 had the 15s price printed on the jacket, and the remaining 9,500 were eeked out over the next few years with the updated sticker. Is this technically a first impression? Yes, but collectors tend to prefer the first 15s printed sticker price.

 

3) The sticker-over-the-sticker-sticker

Examples can sometimes be found where there several stickers have been placed over each other, denoting each successive price rise (rather than sniping the price off and having the sticker put alongside the diagonal cut line). See this example (above) of The Spy Who Loved Me. It actually comes from an 8th impression jacket (1980), which has a printed flap price of £4.95. So this jacket has been re-priced twice. Under the top sticker (showing £6.95), is actually another sticker, showing £5.95. So this same jacket sports three different prices.

 

4) The sticker that ‘isn’t there’


OK. I accept that this one needs explaining!


Here goes: As well as deciding to simply add a new price sticker over an already printed jacket, for the middle run of Fleming books Jonathan Cape appears to have gone through a period of over-printing a new price on an already printed jackets rather than re-stickering them.


It’s not entirely known why, but they appear on books that seem to have longer than usual gaps between impressions – and this is particularly so on Diamonds Are Forever.


This jacket (left) shows this well.


The original price has been clipped, and next to it, instead of there being a sticker, there’s a new printed price – on this occasion it’s 16s net.


This jacket is actually difficult to date. The price is the 1963 price (because Gilbert notes that binder AW Bain re-priced the jackets with the New Years Day 1963 price of 16s), but it could be a either a 5th or 4th or (1963, or 1962).


Records show that the second impression (1958) jacket for this title was overprinted by Bain twice with new prices. (13s 6d for the official New Year’s Day 1959 – 3rd impression – price and at 15s net for the New Year’s Day 1960 price) – so this 16s jacket is post 1960.


Note, above, how Cape would rather use old jackets and overprint a new price, rather than print a new jacket, featuring the most recent books (the flap here only shows books up to 1958’s Dr No – even though several more books would have been out by then (possibly up to and including On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).


PS I haven't forgotten why is this a sticker that isn’t there? Gilbert notes that Diamonds Are Forever books with a price of 16s came as either printed or stickered at this price.


Dr No is another book where old jacket stock (ie previous impression jackets), were over-printed with a new, updated price.


Here’s an example of an overprinted price of 15s from a third impression Dr No (1958).


The overprinting was done on a second impression jacket and the former price was snipped off,

Fantastic finds


The fact there are re-pricings, over-priced stickers, and new stickers on top of old stickers reveals just how long after initial publication some titles were still being supplied to bookshops in the hope they would sell.

 

One assumes that it was when the very final round of official Cape prices were applied (but this time, the books remained on bookseller’s shelves) that Jonathan Cape conceded defeat, and that’s when the decision was taken to stop producing another hardcover impression.

 

Gilbert’s bibliography helpfully tells us when the final impressions of each hardback book was made.

 

However, there is still (I feel), much to be discovered about how long certain hardback books continued to be sold – and it’s only through looking at their price stickers that we can deduce this.

 

I’ve made a number of finds in this respect – and I believe there are still more out there if we look harder.

 

Have a look at the below picture of Octopussy & The Living Daylights. Here we see that it is priced at £7.95.

As most of us know, this title had only one printing (ie no subsequent impressions) – starting out featuring a 10s 6d priced dust jacket – the price originally printed on the front flap, but which – because of poor sales – is instead typically found with an over-priced sticker of 16s or 80p net price. Overpriced stickers denote the book being on the shelves a lot later (in this case, the transition from imperial to decimal – in 1971 – nearly five years after the book was first published)

 

Gilbert documents examples of Octopussy with price stickers of up to and including £4.95 – which he says would have been sold around 1980.

 

To my knowledge however, this is the first – and only – recorded example of a £7.95 priced Octopussy & The Living Daylights (I actually sold it to Jon Gilbert precisely because he told me he’d never seen one before at this price).

 

But there are likely to be many more ‘funds’ out there.


Take, for example, this £5.95 stickered jacket from The Man With the Golden Gun. It’s from the final impression of this title – the 6th printing, published in 1979.

 

This £5.95 price sticker sits next to what would have been the original £4.95 price had it not been snipped off. Gilbert only notes that there is a £4.95 price. He concedes ‘higher prices may also be present’ – bit this suggests he had not personally seen a £5.95-stickered book at the time of writing his bibliography. So this could be another ‘find’.

 

How many more later priced books are out there?

 

It seems entirely plausible to me that there has to be more books out there that have official Jonathan Cape price stickers suggesting they were still on sale for an extended period of time - and for a lot longer than perhaps initially thought.

 

If Octopussy was priced at £4.95 in 1980, and we know a £7.95 example now exists, then it suggests there must be £5.95 and £6.95 examples waiting to be discovered.

 

The fact Octopussy can be found with an official Cape sticker price of £7.95 at all suggests the book was still on bookstore shelves for a lot longer than is the accustomed wisdom - perhaps well into the mid 1980s – almost 20 years after the book was first published.


It's also worth remarking just how expensive this £7.95 would have been (which perhaps explains why this is arguably the most expensive price known. Assuming it was on sale in 1985, this would be the equivalent of £30.12 today!


Other curios

 

If this blog has whet your appetite for searching for later priced Bond books, then that’s great. It excites me to think there are discoveries out there waiting to be found.


I think there’s so much still to uncover about the selling history of these books by their price stickers.

 

Also don’t forget to look out for some other jacket-price curiosities that surely exist.

Take this price sticker for example (above), which comes from a first impression of The Spy Who Loved Me.


Can you spot what’s odd about it?

 

Well, the jacket for this title was already priced at 15s (printed on the front flap). So why has the 15s price been snipped off, then replaced with a 15s sticker?


Answers on a postcard please!  


Finally, have a look at this first impression jacket (left), from 1965's The Man With the Golden Gun.

 

Somewhere along the line, the bookseller who first stocked this title clearly took it upon him/her self to increase the price.


As we can see, it's been hand-altered from 18s to 19s - instead of getting an official Jonathan Cape price sticker.


The cheek of it!

 

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