A special exhibition is set to celebrate the illustrator of the original James Bond book covers.

This summer, The Salisbury Museum in England celebrates the life and work of writer, illustrator and teacher Richard Chopping (1917 – 2008), best-known for illustrating the original book covers for James Bond.

Richard Chopping was a master of the trompe-l'œil technique, producing highly realistic three-dimensional images, and it was this distinctive style that led him to be commissioned by Ian Fleming to illustrate nine of the James Bond book covers from 1957 to 1966.

The exhibition features some of the original working drawings for the books, including the striking skull design for Goldfinger– one of Chopping’s personal favourites, and a commission that had been declined by his former friend and subsequent arch-rival, Lucien Freud.

The exhibition looks at Chopping’s entire output, positioning his work for Fleming firmly within the context of his 40-year career. Highlights from his early years include his illustrations for Butterflies in Britain (1943) and the collection of children’s short stories Mr Postlethwaite's Reindeer (1945). There are also delicate wild flower drawings, prepared for an ambitious 22 volume series on British wild flowers by Penguin, which was abandoned due to spiralling costs, and Chopping’s original design and preparatory studies for the book cover of his first novel The Fly (1965) which was a success despite being described by one reviewer as a ‘just about the most unpleasant book of the year’.
​
With many works which have never previously been displayed, this exhibition will be a genuine treasure-trove for the Chopping cognoscenti and for those discovering his work for the first time. They reveal a talented artist whose work should perhaps be as well-known as the fictional spy he helped make famous.

The exhibition runs from Monday, May 17, 2021 to Sunday, October 3, 2021. For more information visit https://salisburymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/richard-chopping-original-bond-artist​ 

A complete set of first edition, first printings of Ian Fleming’s James Bond series has gone on sale for £475,000.

The collection is being sold by John Atkinson Books, and eleven of the fifteen novels are signed with inscriptions to associates or intimate friends of Ian Fleming. Also included is a signed copy of James Bond’s ‘Birds of the West Indies’.
Each book is contained in the original dust wrapper and each in custom made solander boxes.

The collection consists:
Casino Royale – Signed and inscribed to Lisl Popper, lover of Ian Fleming and one of three people Fleming left £500 to in his will.
Live and Let Die – Signed and inscribed to Muriel Williams, secretary to Fleming at Kemsley Newspapers.
Moonraker – Signed and inscribed to Joyce Emerson, Fleming’s ghost writer on his ‘Atticus’ column
From Russia With Love – Signed and inscribed to Fleming’s chiropractor Raymond Singleton-Ward
Goldfinger – Signed and inscribed to the golfer Sir Henry Cotton
Thunderball – Signed and inscribed to Wing Commander Dobson, who advised Fleming on Vulcan bombers used in the book
The Spy Who Loved Me – Signed and inscribed to William Plomer, friend of Fleming and responsible for having Casino Royale published
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – Signed and inscribed to Joss Pender, golding friend at Royal St. George’s golf club
You Only Live Twice – Signed and inscribed to Aubrey Forshaw, managing director at Pan paperbacks
Octopussy – Signed by actors Roger Moore, Maryam D’Abo and Maud Adams
And
Birds of the West Indies – Signed by James Bond
​
John Atkinson, the rare book dealer based in Harrogate, England, told the Financial Times: “Along with Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter, Bond is one of the best-known characters from 20th-century literature. The books are just very popular and probably always will be, given the success of the films.” 

"The books are like works of art, and the collection gives you an insight into Fleming's lifestyle."

​You can splash out on the collection here.

"Ian Fleming: The Brain Behind Bond" was the final interview recorded with the author. It was first broadcast as a half hour documentary by CBC-TV's Explorations on August 17th, 1964 - just five days after Fleming died.

Th interview was carried out by Munroe Scott, a Candian writer and director, at Goldeneye in Jamaica. With the Caribbean sea in the background, a chain-smoking Fleming appears relaxed as he speaks candidly, articulately and intimitely about his own life and that of his fictional super-spy. 

You can now watch the full interview below.

By Matthew Blackman

On May 12, 1952, Ian Fleming was having lunch at a restaurant in London with the South African writer William Plomer. The two had been friends for years and had worked together in Naval intelligence during World War II. “How,” Fleming suddenly asked, “do you get cigarette smoke out of a woman once you’ve got it in?”

Plomer, bemused, carried on eating, unsure what Fleming was talking about. “You can’t use ‘exhales,’ while ‘puffs out’ sounds silly.” According to Plomer’s biographer, Peter Alexander, Plomer looked up sharply and exclaimed: “You’ve written a book!” After a pause, Fleming admitted that he had. The book was Casino Royale, and Plomer would ultimately be the man who would get it into print, despite the fact that even Fleming’s publisher hated it. 

In many ways Plomer was an unlikely person to steer the world’s most famous secret agent into being. Born in 1903 in the tiny dusty colonial outpost of Pietersburg, in northern South Africa, Plomer was bookish and reclusive. And, very un-Bond-like, he hated gadgets — he refused to have even a telephone in his house. But there was another side to him, a side that sustained friendships with people of diverse backgrounds and vastly different personalities.

Like George Orwell, Plomer was the son of a colonial civil servant and grew up between places. He was partly educated in Great Britain, partly in South Africa. And, also like Orwell, he diverged from his social set, avoiding college for a career as a sheep farmer in South Africa, even though all he ever wanted was to be a writer.

After a year of apprenticing on a sheep farm, Plomer went to Zululand to help his father, who had bought a broken-down old trading station in a beautiful, extremely remote part of the region. There, the 19-year-old Plomer sat down many nights with an oil lamp and a pencil to write his first novel, as well as try his hand at poetry.

The poetry he sent to a man by the name of John Langalibalele Dube, who lived about 80 miles away. Dube was the founding president of the African National Congress — the political party later led by Nelson Mandela — and editor of the Black-focused newspaper Ilanga Lase Natali (The Natal Sun).

Dube liked the poetry and published it. More than that, the two men became friends. Through this friendship and others with activists of colour, Plomer developed loathing for white South African racists, a feeling he expressed through satire in his first novel, Turbott Wolfe. When the 21-year-old Plomer finished Turbott Wolfe, he sent it unsolicited to Britain’s Hogarth Press, the publishing house run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Plomer claimed that the two were drawn to the manuscript, which dealt frankly with interracial love, only because it was written “with hard pencil on thin paper” — he had no typewriter and ordinary paper was heavy and expensive to mail.

The Woolfs decided to publish the novel immediately, and it was well-received in Britain and the United States. In South Africa, though, it was a different story: Many white racists in the country were horrified by the plot. Under considerable social pressure, Plomer — who at 22 had begun to realize and accept his homosexuality — jumped on a ship bound for Japan and wound up settling in London, in 1929. In later life, he wrote of his native country, which had by then begun the policies of apartheid: “I could not imagine living there in a state of tension that I should only find endurable if bent on martyrdom.”

While living in England, Plomer continued to write, publishing several novels, but he had no steady income until, a decade later, he was offered the position of literary adviser to the publisher Jonathan Cape. The job was not an easy one, as Cape, a tall and forbidding figure with iron-gray hair, was known to be a hard-nosed businessman from a tough working-class background. What’s more, Cape had a passionate dislike for fictional thrillers, which Plomer enjoyed. Plomer is said to have found it hard to work for Cape although he respected him as a publisher.

In 1929, Plomer received a party invitation from a man he had never met who professed to have enjoyed Turbott Wolfe — aspiring writer and journalist Ian Fleming. The two would strike up a lasting friendship. Although Plomer never shared Fleming’s passion for women, fast cars and gambling, their mutual enjoyment of witty conversation is what kept the friendship alive for more than 30 years, until Fleming’s death in 1964.

When Fleming finally gave Plomer Casino Royale to have a look at, Plomer “was greatly impressed by it,” Alexander says. The same could not be said for Plomer’s publishers. None of the company directors enjoyed the book or wanted to publish it, with one decrying the novel as “deeply shocking” and cynically violent. Cape himself only read it because of Plomer’s insistence that it had to be published, and would would never read another Bond novel again.

​Still, Cape ended up publishing it in 1953 and in doing so created a cash cow for the publishing house. Throughout their friendship, Plomer continued to offer Fleming literary support: The novel Goldfinger, which has never gone out of print, is dedicated to him.

From The Sun newspaper

A collection of James Bond books, including one that seems to show Ian Fleming’s love of kinky sex, are set to sell for more than £1 million.

A first edition of From Russia, With Love is inscribed to his wife: “To Annie. With love — and lashes — Ian.”
 
The book, one of 114 being sold by a private collector, has a £35,000 estimate at a Sotheby’s auction in London.

One of the lots, priced at £120,000, is a final revised typescript of Diamonds Are Forever.
A copy of Live and Let Die presented to Winston Churchill has a note which reads “from whom I stole some words”.

Another Diamonds Are Forever copy is inscribed to Biffy Dunderdale, a spy who influenced the creation of Bond.

Altogether 114 books will be sold. A display at Sotheby's Bond Street gallery in London will run from November 6 to 10 and includes books, watches and an Aston Martin.

There is also a first edition of Moonraker inscribed to Raymond Chandler, the American detective novelist, who urged Fleming to keep writing about Bond. According to Sotheby's, Chandler's coaxing meant that Moonraker was the third story of 14, rather than the last.

Many fans know that Ian Fleming named his fictional spy after real-life ornithologist James Bond, but how many people know where the number 007 originated from?
 
Well, it turns out that Bond’s licence to kill number was named after a London bus.
 
Between 1934 and 1945, Ian Fleming lived at 22b Ebury Street, London, which later became a home of villain Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker, as well as the starting point of a car chase to Dover.

Ebury Street is directly behind what was then the brand new Victoria Coach Station, which had opened in 1932.
 
In the early 1950s, when Fleming was forming the idea of Bond, he moved out of London to Kent. However, he would regularly travel back to London by a bus from either Dover or Canterbury.
 
And the number of this bus route was…007.
 
Casino Royale was published in 1953, and the rest is history. The bus was taken over by National Express in 1973, and a 007 coach service now runs nine times a day between Deal in Kent and London Victoria Coach station.

Nathan Rushton, the driver of the 007 bus, said: “While James Bond is more likely to be seen behind the wheel of a Bentley, it’s a massive honour to drive the 007 and it certainly attracts a lot of attention.

"People in Kent have always believed James Bond was named after this local service and I personally think the fact Ian Fleming also previously lived so close to the coach station at Victoria proves it – it’s just too much of a coincidence otherwise.”

Sights that can be spotted while aboard the 007 include Canterbury’s city walls, Dover and Deal castles and even France over the English Channel on a clear day.
​
Nathan added: “Bond is suave, sophisticated and devastatingly cool, so it’s quite funny to think he could have been named after a bus, but then again what could be more quintessentially British?”

If you have just robbed Fort Knox and have a cool £19.5 million in the bank, how about this for A View to a Kill!

Apartment 0.07 at Twenty Grosvenor Square, London, is named after Ian Fleming's super spy. The 5,863sq ft triplex has a double garage for both your Aston Martins, a lift, games room and private bar.

This Four Seasons residence is part of Finchatton's luxury 37-unit develoment in the heart of Mayfair - handy for a game of bridge at Blades, but a solid 50-minute walk to MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross.

Visit 20gs.com/ to register your interest!

Photos copyright Simon Brown.

From the Daily Mail

A British spy working in Poland during the height of the Cold War was a 36-year-old man from Devon called James Bond.
 
Not only did the debonair agent share his name with Ian Fleming's famous creation, but he was also “interested in women” like his namesake, researchers have discovered.
Documents uncovered by investigators at Poland's Institute of National Remembrance show that the man, whose full name was James Albert Bond, arrived in Warsaw on February 18, 1964.

He used the cover of secretary-archivist at the British Embassy during his time in the country.

But his real mission, according to the documents from Poland's communist counter-intelligence agency, was to “penetrate military facilities”.

Researchers at the Institute of National Remembrance said: “James Bond came to Poland on February 18, 1964.

“His official position was secretary-archivist of the British Embassy's military attaché.

“The arrival of such a famous agent did not go unnoticed by the officers of Department II (counterintelligence) of the Ministry of the Interior.

“An operational surveillance case code-named ‘Samek’ was established and he was placed under strict surveillance.

“Bond was found to be talkative but very cautious and was interested in women.

“Contacts with Polish citizens - not found. In October and November 1964, he went with two attaché employees to the Bialystok and Olsztyn provinces to ‘penetrate military facilities’.”

They added: “The observation of the agent’s actions did not go unnoticed, he probably said that there was no chance of gaining valuable information.

“Therefore, on January 21, 1965, James Bond left the territory of the Polish People's Republic.

“After his stay, there were still records and fragmentary documents concerning the observation.”

Choosing espionage as an occupation is probably not the best idea if your real name is actually James Bond!

From the London Evening Standard

Winston Churchill’s “favourite” spy who inspired Bond girl Vesper Lynd in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale was today honoured with a blue plaque.

The tribute to Christine Granville, Britain’s first and longest-serving female special agent, was unveiled at 1 Lexham Gardens Hotel in Kensington, London.

In the 1940s, it was known as the Shelbourne Hotel and was Granville’s London base after the Second World War.

Born Krystyna Skarbek in Warsaw in 1908, Granville joined British Intelligence after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. She completed various missions - including skiing over the snow-bound Polish border in temperatures of -30°C, smuggling microfilm across Europe which proved Hitler’s plans to invade the Soviet Union and rescuing French Resistance agents from the Gestapo.

So essential was she to British intelligence, she was often referred to as Churchill’s favourite spy.

She was also close friends with Fleming, who said she was an inspiration for his character Lynd when he was promoting the book in 1953.

Granville was murdered, aged 37, in London by an ex-lover who was later executed for the crime.

Both her alias and her birth name feature on the plaque.

Anna Eavis, Curatorial Director at English Heritage, said: “Christine Granville served Britain bravely and brilliantly during the Second World War. We hope that our blue plaque will help more people to discover her remarkable story and her connection with London.”
​
Clare Mulley, author of The Spy Who Loved, Granville’s biography, said: “All too often women in the resistance are remembered for the beauty and courage, while their achievements are overlooked. Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, was one of the most effective special agents to serve Britain during the Second World War, male or female.