Best of James Bond 30th Anniversary 2 CD Set

The Best of James Bond 30th Anniversary Limited Edition 2 CD Ultra-Set, EMI Records, © 1992.

At the time this was released, halfway between the six-year chasm that separated License To Kill and Goldeneye, this collection must have provided much-needed hope for fans that James Bond would return, and it was unquestionably the best Bond music compilation available.  We purchased our copy, one of the museum's earliest acquisitions, in the late 1990's, at the now-extinct Virgin Megastore at the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

The first disc contains the theme songs to the then-16 films.  Before the soundtracks were re-released with additional material on CD, before Napster, before YouTube, if you wanted most of the material on the second disc, you needed to own this collection.

The most memorable part of this set is not any of the tracks, however.  That honor goes to this line from the booklet, the most ridiculous thing I have ever read about a Bond movie: 

"A View To A Kill" is actually one of the better Moore episodes, a basically serious adventure story that offers some suspense and an edge of danger.

Octopussy 6th U.K. Penguin Paperback Printing

Octopussy & the Living Daylights, Ian Fleming, 6th Penguin paperback printing, U.K.

This edition contains four stories: "Octopussy", "The Property of a Lady", "The Living Daylights", and "007 in New York".

Among Fleming's Bond titles, Octopussy is the hardest to find, so when we stumbled upon this printing in a bookshop in Dallas last year, we nabbed it.

Penguin became the new Bond paperback publisher in 2002 in both the U.S. and the U.K., with different cover art in each country.

We would like to say that this cover art is the most forgettable that we've posted so far, but you can't forget what you didn't know in the first place, and we just don't know what we're looking at.