As collector
The Centenary edition not only celebrates Ian Fleming as a writer but commemorates his love of books and his little known role as a collector of rare, first editions.
Fleming started collecting in the 1930s when he was a young man – years before he wrote his first book. With the expert guidance of bibliophile Percy Muir, he was to build up an original and distinctive collection of titles.
The theme was ‘milestones in human progress’. He wanted books ‘which started something’ or ‘which made things happen’ – that is to say the primary printed sources for the great discoveries, inventions and scientific theories of modern times. He was interested, too, in new philosophical or political ideas, and handbooks on sports or pastimes.
| Examples include: |
The Invention of the Electric Battery
The Foundation of Modern Sanitation
The Suez Canal Project
Darwin’s The Theory of Evolution
The Foundation of the Salvation Army
Fingerprints and Criminology
Freud’s The Meaning of Dreams
Training Manual, Royal Flying Corps
The Radio Times, volume1, no.1.
Lifeboat Design
The Golfer’s Manual. |
This list gives a flavour of the wide variety of subjects included in the collection, which in the end amounted to around 1,000 books. Fleming preserved each volume in a fleece-lined, buckram box, whose label was colour-coded to indicate the section to which it belonged: red for sociology, orange for pure science, green for medicine etc.
The collection, part of which once occupied a wall of his country home (see above), was considered of such national importance that it was evacuated from London during the Blitz. It now resides in the Lilly Library, Indiana University. For further information on the collection.
Percy Muir later said of his part in the formation of Fleming’s collection that it was amongst the proudest achievements of his life.
Fleming was the largest private lender to the seminal exhibition Printing and the Mind of Man put on in London in 1963.
The Book Collector
In 1952 Ian Fleming, Percy Muir and John Hayward (associate and muse of T.S. Eliot) jointly founded The Book Collector, a British antiquarian quarterly. Owned by Fleming, and published initially by Queen Anne Press, it has since been described as “the most authoritative publication in its field in the world.”
As Binder
Ian Fleming often had books specially bound, and almost always by the firm of Sangorski and Sutcliffe. The firm’s successor, Shepherds, Sangorski and Sutcliffe (known generally today as Shepherds), is responsible for all three bindings of the Centenary Edition.
A limited edition of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service bound in quarter vellum on black cloth was produced under Ian Fleming’s instructions in 1963. The vellum sets created by Queen Anne Press for the Centenary Edition are inspired by his original design.
He also had private books beautifully bound. At Goldeneye in Jamaica, where the Bond books were written, Fleming kept a notebook of his underwater forays to the coral reef that fringed his property. It was bound in green morocco, with a fish eye on the front .
The Collector Collected
Little did Ian Fleming imagine when he spent a few pounds and shillings on the odd volume in his early days of book collecting, that he would one day become a writer himself, and that his own novels would be sought after by collectors all over the world. Please contact: www.harringtonbooks.co.uk www.sotherans.co.uk |
