James Bond has been thrilling movie audiences for well over 40 years ever since the first Bond movie "Dr. No" burst onto cinema screens back in 1962. Interest in Bond will likely be greater with the release later this year of "Casino Royale" - the first Bond film in several years. Most people are familiar with Bond from the movies, and it is easy to forget that Bond had his beginnings in print a decade before the first Bond movie.

Since the first book "Casino Royale" by Ian Fleming was published to wide acclaim in 1953, collecting Bond books has become almost as popular as reading them. Today if you are lucky enough to own a first edition of "Casino Royale" with its rather attractive dust-jacket with its gambling motif designed by Fleming himself, it may be worth around $30,000. Not bad, considering Fleming sat down one day at his house in Jamaica to write as a way of dealing with his mid-life crisis.

The fifth Bond book "From Russia with Love" is important to collectors as it was the first book to feature a dust-jacket designed by the artist Richard Chopping. The rest of the books in the series would all feature attractive and distinctive covers featuring elements from the stories designed by Chopping, which today only adds to their appeal and value. At the height of "Bond-mania" in the early 1960s, President Kennedy declared that "From Russia with Love" was one of his favorite books.

The Bond books have been reprinted many times both in hardback and paperback over the last few decades. Today it is fairly easy to find the later books in good condition at reasonable prices as well as "book club" editions or reprints of the earlier books. There are also British and US versions of all the books - adding further to the options for collectors. Fleming also wrote a book called "Thrilling Cities" - a travel guide rather in the style of his novels, which today is out of print and highly sought after. After Fleming's death, several other authors continued to write Bond stories - many Bond enthusiasts also collect the books by John Gardner and Raymond Benson. Most of these are fairly easy to find and not as valuable as the Fleming books. The Bond books are still in print - currently they are published by Penguin Books USA in paperback with rather striking gaudy covers.

But the item most coveted by most serious collectors of Bond books is a particular edition of one of Fleming's later books, "The Man with the Golden Gun." Published in 1965, after Fleming's untimely death, a limited number of the books were printed with an embossed golden gun stamped on the book's cover. The publishers, Jonathan Cape, never revealed the exact number of books with this logo; recently copies have turned up in book auctions in such far-flung places as South Africa and New Zealand. A copy of the book with the embossed gun is worth around $5,000, although in this case it perhaps isn't the money - simply the chance to own a literary rarity.