For Your Eyes Only.

FLEMING, Ian.

Item Number: 123654

London: Jonathan Cape, 1960.

First edition of the eighth novel in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. Octavo, original black cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by Ian Fleming on the front free endpaper , “Max. An Easter Egg! from Ian.” The recipient, Fleming’s close personal friend and newspaper tycoon William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook was of great consequence to Fleming and the James Bond series. Noted as a hero of Fleming. He enjoyed the James Bond novels. and bought the rights to adapt the book into strip cartoons for his Daily Express, giving Ian Fleming’s creation the widest possible coverage. Beaverbrook is mentioned in The Spy Who Loved Me (Gilbert, p. 634). In tribute to Beaverbrook, Fleming made the Express one of the few papers that Bond read on a regular basis (Fergus Fleming, The Man With the Golden Typewriter, p. 46). For Your Eyes Only was serialized in the Express in 1961. Fleming was approached by Beaverbrook’s Daily Express in 1957 with regard to adapting the Bond novels to comic strips, and although Fleming had some reservations, he assented and the first Bond strip, Casino Royale, was published in the Express the following year. Fleming and Beaverbrook initially got on cordially, as displayed by the inscription, and both were a great admirer of the other. They both had estates in Jamaica, where they met on various occasions. Their relationship soured in 1962 however, when Fleming sold the rights to The Living Daylights to Beaverbrook’s competitor, The Sunday Times. Beaverbrook was so incensed that he broke off all business relations with Fleming, and even terminated the ongoing comic strip Thunderball mid-story. They later mended their relationship, and the comic series resumed in 1964 with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Both Beaverbrook and Fleming died within a couple of months of each other the same year. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Richard Chopping. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Out of all the Bond books, For Your Eyes Only is the most difficult to find inscribed, with Fleming apparently inscribing far fewer copies of this novel than for his other books. Any inscribed copies are consequently highly sought after, and a presentation copy to such a significant figure is especially desirable.

The collection contains five short stories: "From a View to a Kill", "For Your Eyes Only", "Quantum of Solace", "Risico" and "The Hildebrand Rarity". It has "the only British dust jacket with any depiction of Bond: the eye in the peephole is his. Fleming made artist Richard Chopping paint it many times, until he was satisfied with the shape and, particularly, the color" (Biondi & Pickard, 46). It was made into the 1981 film starring Roger Moore and Carole Bouquet; the 1985 film A View to a Kill starring Moore, Christopher Walken, and Grace Jones and the 2008 film A Quantum of Solace starring Daniel Craig.