Comments on: Recovering Bond

By: gary day-ellison

gary day-ellison — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:06:42 +0000

There are some older Pan editions with a B/W photo of Bond holding his gun showing in the bottom right-hand corner. That man is actually Ralph Vernon-Hunt who was MD at Pan at the time. RVH was a spitfire ace in WWII so it had a certain dash, and saved on a model fee, both perfect for his style.

Gary

By: Livros - Recovering Bond - RetortaBlog

Livros - Recovering Bond - RetortaBlog — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:44:51 +0000

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By: mark valentine

mark valentine — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:44:35 +0000

John

I agree – the usual image of him in an evening suit, with smoke spiralling from a cigarette in an elegant holder, doesn’t quite suggest the furtive forager amongst old tomes. But in the introduction to that lost classic he says his own desert island luxury would be the Times Lit Supp dropped each week by a well-trained albatross!

Mark

By: John

John — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:22:36 +0000

Thanks Mark, didn’t know about Fleming’s book collecting. Charlie Higson didn’t mention that in his Fleming profile in the Guardian at the weekend, it doesn’t quite chime with the common perception of the author being a kind of Bond manqué.

By: mark valentine

mark valentine — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:29:36 +0000

John, I agree with you about the imagination and spirit behind these designs and it’s the more appropriate because Ian Fleming was himself a keen book collector and edited a book collecting magazine for a while. In fact, he was featured in the Times Literary Supplement last week on the strength of it: he got his own publisher, Cape, to reprint a 1930s lost classic, All Night At Mr Stanyhurst’s by Hugh Edwards: a novel of 18th century shipwreck.

By: John

John — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:26:18 +0000

I like the old Pan covers partly for shameless nostalgic reasons since they were the first Bond books I saw. You used to see them everywhere and a friend at school in the Seventies had the full set. What you can’t see from the Flickr scan is the bulletholes punched through the Thunderball cover.

More importantly, those were the first books I remember seeing that showed how you could communicate the essence of a story through a few visual motifs, and do that across a whole series. That made a big impression at the time.

By: simon

simon — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:05:52 +0000

Those old Bond covers are just fabulous, aren’t they? So tactile. But I agree with you — the new ones have the right stuff.

I have a full set of Bonds from the mid 70s, girls on every cover…and all of them straddling giant golden guns! And wearing disco jackets too, pink vinyl etc. Well, it was the height of the Roger Moore era, but even so, give me David-Niven era 007 over *that* any day.