You only live twice / Ian Fleming.
Ian Fleming (1908-1964)
Category
Books
Date
1964
Materials
Place of origin
London
Collection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 3061411
Summary
Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, London: Jonathan Cape, 1964. Binding: Twentieth-century full black publisher's cloth; gilt Japanese characters on upper board; silver-lettered spine; printed pictorial dust-wrapper by Richard Chopping (1917-2008), as issued.
Full description
1964 was a good year for James Bond. Fleming's hero had had his profile raised by the American president John F. Kennedy, who cited ‘From Russia with Love’ as one of his favourite books, and by the success of ‘Dr No’ (1962) and ‘From Russia with Love’ (1963), the first two of the unstoppable sequence of Bond films. In 1964 Bond returned to the screen in ‘Goldfinger’, regarded as one of the best of the series, and which has an unexpected connection with Anglesey Abbey. Two years previously, Lord Fairhaven had sold his 1937 Rolls Royce Phantom III; it was bought by EON Films, and appears in the film in the role of Auric Goldfinger's car. A celebrated sequence shows the Rolls being stripped of its bodywork, which turns out to be made of smuggled gold bullion. The same year saw the last of the Bond novels to be published in Fleming's lifetime. Written by a man who had not long to live, ‘You Only Live Twice’ has an elegiac tone. Grieving for the loss of his wife at the hands of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Bond goes undercover in Japan to find the identity of the mysterious Dr Shatterhand who runs a 'Garden of Death' offering a variety of means for the suicidal to end it all. The villain turns out to be none other than Blofeld, whom Bond finally kills with his bare hands. The novel ends with Bond, now stricken with amnesia, leaving the Japanese island where he has been living in seclusion, in search of his true identity. Fleming held that the appearance of his books was an important part of their appeal, and laid down strict instructions as to what was to appear on the jackets. Since 1957 these had largely been drawn by the artist Richard Chopping (1917-2008), whom Fleming described as ‘the finest ‘trompe l'oeil’ artist working today’. Fleming had met Chopping through his wife Ann, who had been to a joint exhibition Chopping had given with Francis Bacon; at her suggestion, he was engaged to produce the cover of ‘From Russia with Love’ for 50 guineas. By 1964 his fee had increased to 300 guineas, partly met out of Fleming's own pocket. The cover for ‘You Only Live Twice’ depicts a chrysanthemum, a dragonfly and a toad, toad sweat being, according to Fleming, a traditional Japanese aphrodisiac. Ian Fleming himself amassed a noteworthy collection of books in collaboration with the bookseller Percy Muir, with whom he was to found the journal ‘The Book Collector’ in 1952. In the early 1930s he instructed Muir to find him first editions of post-1800 scientific and technical works: `books that marked milestones of progress — books that had started something'. The resulting collection formed the nucleus of the famous ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’ exhibition in 1963 and was ultimately sold to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Text adapted from William Hale's entry in ‘Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey’, National Trust, 2013, cat. 50, pp. 152-3.
Bibliographic description
255, [1] p. ; 20 cm. Provenance: pencil inscription on front pastedown: "Fairhaven. Anglesey Abbey. April 1964." [i.e.: Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966)]. National Trust oak leaf stamp on verso of title page: 'The National Trust founded 1895'. Binding: Twentieth-century full black publisher's cloth; gilt Japanese characters on upper board; silver-lettered spine; printed pictorial dust-wrapper by Richard Chopping (1917-2008), as issued. Bookseller's ticket on front pastedown: 'Bowes & Bowes / New & secondhand booksellers / Trinity Street / Cambridge'.
Provenance
Bought by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) in April 1964 from Bowes and Bowes (booksellers) and then bequeathed by him to the National Trust with the house and the rest of the contents in 1966.
Makers and roles
Ian Fleming (1908-1964), author
References
Mark Purcell, William Hale and David Person, Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey, Swindon: National Trust; London: Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers, 2013., pp. 152-3