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  • Ian Fleming: The Bibliography by Jon Gilbert
  • Angus O'Neill (bio)
Ian Fleming: The Bibliography. By Jon Gilbert. London: Queen Anne Press. 2012. 692 pp. + 32 plates. £175 (regular edition); £250 (special edition). ISBN 978 0 9558189 6 7; 978 0 9558189 7 4.

Most readers of the library will be familiar with the book collector, a quarterly periodical founded in 1952 by a journalist and former Commando, whose own collection formed the backbone of the famous Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition. 1952 was for him a landmark year, in which he also fulfilled a long-held ambition to write a spy novel. Usually, when rich bibliophiles indulge in fiction, a succès d'estime is the best result that can be expected, but the career of Ian Fleming — as, for once, practically everyone knows — followed a different trajectory.

The production of a full bibliography of Fleming has taken longer than might have been expected. The first serious attempt was made by Iain Campbell, who produced a wrappered volume of 72 pages in 1978, which is still useful. This is a very different object. The present writer suggested previously in this journal (The Library, VII, 13 (2012), 484-85) that C. Edgar Grissom's Hemingway was perhaps, at a little over 2 kg, the weightiest author-bibliography yet produced: a hostage to fortune, indeed, for Jon Gilbert's volume is more than half as heavy again. It may seem strange that so much labour has been devoted to an author who barely disturbs the calm surface of Eng. Lit. as studied in most universities, but there are several reasons why the harrumphing of senior purists might profitably be set aside when considering the usefulness of this book.

The power of money cannot be ignored, of course. One of the 'drivers' behind this publication is the sheer cash value of so many Fleming first editions. A fine copy in dustwrapper of Casino Royale (1953) is likely to cost over £30,000, and the next half-dozen novels in the series will each cost thousands in similar condition — if they are 'right', i.e. in the first state printings, and with the original first-issue dust wrappers. This area has been, until now, something of a minefield. A fellow bookseller remembers the widow who tried to sell her late husband's Fleming collection a decade ago, and was disappointed when the original supplier showed an unexpected lack of interest. Subsequent (one hopes it was subsequent) scholarship had [End Page 480] established that every single wrapper was 'supplied' from a later impression. Misfortune? Carelessness? Whatever it was, it amounted to a loss of many thousands of pounds. Jon Gilbert's work will make such disagreeable surprises a lot less widespread.

Even for those readers who may be immune to the cult of James Bond, or indeed simply baffled by it, the volume of detail in this bibliography is impressive. Gilbert has been lucky in that both Ian Fleming's estate and his publishers have allowed him access to, as far as one can see, everything: the result is a very worthwhile conspectus of printing and publishing practices in 1950s and 1960s England and America, to say nothing of the allied arts of marketing and promotion. It seems perfectly possible that intelligent conjectures about other titles of the period could be supported by reference to some of the detailed printing histories given here: we are given much more raw data than most bibliographers have felt able to provide. The minutiae of twentieth-century book cloths, print runs, price changes and so on have never been studied more thoroughly. The course of the serious end of English literature may not have been affected by the Bond phenomenon as it was by, for instance, Le Carré. However intellectual snobbery should not detract from close study, and the abovementioned purists might consider Hugh Massingberd's recollection of Anthony Powell, who 'used to say, if there had been a Burke's Bank Clerks he would have been as eager a customer for that as for Burke's Landed Gentry': with some justification, for it is the detail which captivates and illuminates.

The production standards...

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