Deighton (Len) The Ipcress File

London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1962.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Plain endpapers. Original orange boards. Dust-jacket.

The debut that broke the spy novel’s class ceiling: an unnamed, bespectacled, chippy grammar-school narrator who cooks, quibbles his expenses, and distrusts his own side with the same professionalism he applies to the opposition – published while Bond still held the field unchallenged, and instantly recognised as the anti-Bond the genre had been waiting for.