ON IAN FLEMING’S BOOKS, BOOK COLLECTION, AND OWNERSHIP OF THE BOOK COLLECTOR –
ONE OF 150 STANDARD COPIES SIGNED BY HIS NEPHEWS JAMES AND FERGUS FLEMING
FLEMING, Ian Lancaster – James FERGUSSON (editor). Ian Fleming: The Book Collector. London: Queen Anne Press, 2017.
Octavo (240 x 165mm), pp. ix (blank l., half-title, verso blank, title, verso blank, contents, verso blank, ‘Foreword’), [1 (blank)], 150, [2 (blank l.)], [4 (limitation statement, verso blank, colophon, verso blank)], [2 (blank l.)]. 20 colour-printed plates, printed with illustrations recto-and-verso, some double-page. One mounted colour-printed illustration. (Small marginal marks on pp. 32-33.) Original red cloth, upper board and spine lettered in gilt, lower board with publisher’s device in gilt, red-and-black endbands, black endpapers. (Extremities minimally bumped.) Provenance: Queen Anne Press (loosely inserted compliments slip) – pencilled corrections to footnote on p. 12.
First edition, number 035 of 150 copies signed by James Fleming and Fergus Fleming. One lesser-known aspect of Ian Fleming’s life was his book collecting, which began in his early twenties. With the assistance of P.H. Muir of Elkin Matthews’s bookshop, Fleming eventually assembled a remarkable collection of books which had ‘started something’ (quoted by J. Hayward, ‘Commentary’ in The Book Collector, vol. 13 (1964), pp. 431-446 at p. 431) – landmark works by figures such as Marx, Darwin, and Einstein that shaped the modern world (this collection, now at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library, would provide numerous exhibits to the 1963 exhibition ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’). In 1952 – the year in which he married Ann Rothermere and wrote Casino Royale – Fleming established The Book Collector(which succeeded an earlier periodical, The Book Handbook), with an editorial board composed of himself, P.H. Muir, and the literary scholar and bibliophile John Hayward.
After Fleming’s death in 1964, Hayward wrote in The Book Collector that ‘[a]lthough we were sometimes asked whether there was any connection between the creator of James Bond and the Ian Fleming whose name used to stand at the head of this page, very few of the former’s countless admirers were aware of his keen interest in book collecting. If he was inclined to regard bibliophily as a weakness which had in his case to be justified by strenuous bouts of golf, bridge, and underwater swimming, he treated it nevertheless very seriously, was uncommonly well-informed, and touchingly proud of his association with the journal. He was in fact the founder and chief proprietor of The Book Collector. (He owned 49/50ths of the shoe-string upon which its existence in the early days depended)’ (loc. cit.). In 1965 The Book Collectorpassed into the ownership of Nicolas Barker, who edited it until 2016, when it was acquired by Ian Fleming’s nephew, James Fleming.
In his ‘Foreword’ to Ian Fleming: The Book Collector, James Fleming recalls that after taking control of The Book Collector ‘my brother Fergus and I decided that we should bring out a special edition devoted to the life, as a great book collector, of our uncle, Ian Fleming’ (p. ix). In due course a dedicated issue of The Book Collector (vol. 66, no. 1) appeared in 2017, and all but three of the articles in that issue are collected in the present volume. These articles cover many aspects of Ian Fleming’s books and book collecting, and comprise James Fleming’s ‘My Uncle Ian’; Fergus Fleming’s ‘Ian Fleming and The Book Collector’; James Fergusson’s ‘The Death of “The Doctor”: Ian Fleming Intervenes’; Joel Silver’s ‘Books That Started Something: Ian Fleming’s Book Collection’; Nicolas Barker’s ‘Percy Muir: Ian Fleming’s Bookseller’; A.S.G. Edwards’s ‘Friendship and Fiction: Ian Fleming and Robert Harling’; John Cork’s ‘James Bond Invades America: A Tale of Three Publishers’; Jon Gilbert’s ‘Collecting Ian Fleming: The Making of a Bibliography’; Mirjam M. Foot’s ‘Dust-Jacket by Richard Chopping for Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, 1964’; and Sheila Markham’s ‘Two Bond Collectors in Conversation with Sheila Markham: Michael L. VanBlaricum & Jeremy Miles’.
Ian Fleming: The Book Collector was published by the Queen Anne Press, which had been founded by Lord Kemsley (owner of The Sunday Times and thus Fleming’s sometime employer) in 1952 to publish The Book Collector under Fleming’s direction. In tandem with the journal, the Queen Anne Press also published works by T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and others in its early years. In 1955, however, Kemsley withdrew his support from The Book Collector (leading Fleming to acquire the title) and the Queen Anne Press ceased to print The Book Collector. After passing through various hands in the late 20th century, in 2007 the Queen Anne Press imprint was acquired by Kate Grimond (Peter Fleming’s daughter) and Fergus Fleming, and issued a series of works by or related to Ian Fleming and his brother Peter Fleming. Although the limitation statement records that Ian Fleming: The Book Collector was published in an edition of 26 special copies lettered A-Z and 150 standard copies numbered 1-150 (including the present copy), James Fergusson, the editor of the volume, has subsequently stated that a 27th lettered copy was also issued, identified by the character which won ‘The Twenty-Seventh Letter’ competition announced in the Ian Fleming issue of The Book Collector.
£225
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