Book and Magazine Collector Celebrates Fleming Novels.

The latest edition of the British publication ‘Book and Magazine Collector’ (BMC) (no.305, March 2009) celebrates its 25 th birthday with a homage to the Ian Fleming Bond books and also carries an article on how to spot faked Fleming signatures.

The main article, ‘Guilt-Edged Bonds’ by Jonathan Scott, explores the recession-proof market in Ian Fleming hardback novels and also offers some entertaining reflections on how Scott’s boyhood dreams of owning Roger Moore’s amphibious Lotus Esprit from ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ were shattered when the car was sold at Bonhams auction house last December.

According to Scott, of all the modern First Editions sought by book collectors, Fleming remains ‘one of the safest investments’. He points out that, in the very first issue of BMC back in March, 1984, a First Edition of ‘Casino Royale’ was valued at £200-£400. Today the same book can reach a hammer price of between £15,000 and £20,000 at auction.

Illustrated with some nice reproductions of some of the Fleming First Edition dust-jackets and the early Pan paperback covers, the article also explores the perils of buying copies of Fleming books online. Extreme caution should be exercised, as there are some very good fakes out there.

There is also some useful coverage of American First Editions, including ‘You Asked For It’ (the re-titled ‘Casino Royale’) and ‘Too Hot To Handle’ (the U.S. title for ‘Moonraker’). Apparently, Fleming had originally suggested ‘The Double-O Agent’ or ‘The Deadly Gamble’ as alternative titles for ‘Casino Royale’ in the U.S. market, but the publishers wanted a more American-sounding pulp-fiction approach, with ‘Jimmy Bond’ mentioned on the back cover. As BMC has had extensive coverage of James Bond in the past, it rounds off Scot’s article with some information on the American hardbacks, and publishes for the first time a U.S. edition price guide.

An added bonus to the March issue of BMC is a short piece by Rod Collins on ‘How to Spot a Fake Spy’, which investigates the extent to which faked Fleming signatures have entered the book collecting market. Collins records how he was offered signed First Editions of ‘The Man With the Golden Gun’ and ‘Octopussy’ on eBay, which would have been a major achievement, as Fleming was dead by the time they came out! Moreover, as Collins points out, as a dedicated book collector himself, Ian Fleming was acutely aware of the value of his own autograph and did not sign as frequently as many authors do today. He also often just wrote ‘from the author’, rather than actually sign his name, and rarely signed on the title pages of his books.

BMC has been very generous to Bond fans over the years. Its first issue in 1984 contained a detailed article on the Fleming novels and other early general publications on 007, and Bond in all his forms has been regularly covered, including the film tie-in novels and continuation novels. In December, 1995, for example, an article called ‘The Bond File’ explored the growing market in collectable books about both Ian Fleming and James Bond, and in May, 2008, BMC celebrated the Fleming Centenary with a very detailed overview of Ian Fleming’s own book collection, which is now held at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

BMC no.305, March, 2009, is on sale now in British newsagents, priced £3.50.