Casino Royale

Jonathan Cape, 1953. Octavo. Original black boards, spine lettered in red, red heart device on front cover. With dust jacket. Housed in a custom blue quarter morocco solander box. Edges foxed, sporadically affecting margins, contents clean. A very good copy in like, gently foxed jacket, not price-clipped, couple of nicks and short closed tears, a bright and sharp example. First edition, second impression, presentation copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, "To Tanis and Teddy Read and burn! from The Author. Aoüt 1953". The married couple Tanis and Teddy resided with the Flemings at their Goldeneye estate the following year for, in Ann Fleming's words, "twelve interminable days" (quoted in Lycett). The endless flirting between Tanis Eva Bulkeley Guinness (1908-1993) and Charles "Teddy" Edward Harold John Phillips (1907-2006) proved to be a nuisance to Ian Fleming; in early 1954, attempting to write Moonraker (1955), his concentration was frequently interrupted by their pet names of "Bear" and "Lion". "At one stage Ian was driven to announce at the luncheon table that he and Ann were going away for a short while, and that their visitors could, of course, continue to use the house. Since Ann had not been informed of this ploy, it caused some embarrassment. Ann had to produce some clever social footwork, which only resulted in Ian accusing her of being a traitor" (Lycett). Following this confrontation, temperatures cooled; the Flemings were not driven out of their own home, and Tanis and Teddy would subsequently offer their hosts two bottles of whisky as an apology. Interestingly, Teddy was a relative of Ian Fleming's intimate friend Ivar Bryce, who was instrumental in finding for Fleming the Goldeneye estate, on Jamaica's north shore. Fleming wrote the Bond novels with the assistance of an unusual clause in his contract as foreign news manager of Kemsley Newspapers: Fleming would take January and February as his annual paid leave, during which time he worked on his novels at Goldeneye. Casino Royale, the first of the Bond novels, was first published earlier the same year. This copy is from the significant Ian Fleming collection of Martin Schøyen (b.1940), with his bookplate. Schøyen's private collection of manuscripts, which span all cultures and all time periods, is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind. Gilbert A1a(2); The Schøyen Collection No. 3. Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming: The Man Who Created James Bond, 2012; Edward Abel Smith, Ian Fleming's Inspiration: The Truth Behind the Books, 2020, p. 159.