James Bond, Agent X653

There’s a couple of duplicates here, and the books are not in order. There’s a couple of books by another author. None of this matters.

A couple of weeks ago I was working in a house in Milbrook in Bedfordshire and spotted this nice row of books, nearly all 1960s James Bond Pan paperbacks. I asked nicely and was allowed to photograph them and have a close look at one or two.

I saw that the copy of From Russia With Love had the same cover art as my own 1962 copy, but I also had a look at their copy of The Spy Who Loved Me. My example of this book is a hardback, so I was interested to see this paperback's front cover.

The map on the front cover artwork shows the area where much of the action takes place, which is where you might find the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, in the Adirondack Mountains in the North of New York State. This particular Pan book was printed (if I remember) in 1969. I wrote about my hardback copy and some of its history here.

A Hawkey Series cover Bond novel. (See below)

The tale is written in the first person by Vivienne Michel. She joins the American Automobile Association in Pall Mall and gets all the AAA maps she needs. She buys a Vespa motor scooter from a dealer in Hammersmith, and has it shipped to Quebec. She takes the cheapest Trans-Canada flight she can find to Montreal “on a beautiful first-of-September morning” On the fifteenth of the month she starts her ride South from Quebec and into the USA.

Here’s the part of the novel that refers to the map. Vivienne has being travelling for about two weeks, and has been visiting the attractions:

“ It was at the end of these two weeks that I found myself at Lake George, the dreadful hub of tourism in the Adirondacks that has somehow managed to turn the history and the forests and the wildlife into honkytonk.

Apart from the rather imposing stockade fort and the harmless steamers that ply up to Fort Ticonderoga and back, the rest is a gimcrack nightmare of concrete gnomes, Bambi deer and toad-stools, shoddy food stalls selling ‘Big Chief Hamburgers’ and ‘Minnehaha Candy Floss’, and ‘Attractions’ such as ‘Animal Land’ (‘Visitors may hold and photograph costumed chimps’), ‘Gaslight Village’ (‘Genuine 1890 gas-lighting’), and ‘Storytown U.S.A.’, a terrifying babyland nightmare which I need not describe.

It was here where I fled away from the horrible mainstream that Route 9 had become, and took to the dusty side road through the forest that was to lead me to the Dreamy Pines Motor Court and to the armchair where I have been sitting remembering just exactly how I happened to get here.”

See how many places mentioned above you can find in the cover map. (Below)

In 1963, there was a fresh new look to the Pan Bond novels. The graphic designer and novelist Raymond Hawkey created an overall uniform design for the series, with minimal graphics and ‘James Bond’ printed large on the cover. This could not have hurt sales, and millions of copies of the ‘Hawkey Series’ Bond paperbooks were sold. This, of course, is one of them.

Pan X numbered Bond books.

The Pan X number seems to be in order of first publication. X653 The Spy Who Loved Me comes between book X652, Tamiko by Ronald Kirkbride “The bestseller of love and life in modern Japan” and book X654, Bridge for Beginners by Victor Mollo and Nico Gardener “with diagrams”

Watch for deer.