On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Jonathan Cape, 1963. Octavo. Original grey-brown boards (binding A, no priority), spine lettered in silver, white ski track design on front cover. With dust jacket. Housed in a custom cream cloth chemise and slipcase by James MacDonald of New York. A little rubbing, slight lean to spine, publisher's date stamp on rear free endpaper verso. A very good copy indeed in like dust jacket, not price-clipped, spine lettering unusually bright, couple of nicks and spots of rubbing, foxing to rear panel, a sharp example. First edition, first impression, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his typist on the front free endpaper: "To Margaret Anderson who wrote it! from Ian Fleming"; together with 11 typed copy sheets from Anderson, mostly letters to Fleming's secretary Beryl Griffie-Williams, with secretarial annotations. Margaret Anderson has signed her name above Fleming's inscription, adding "finished 5/5/1962", most likely referring to the date she finished typing the present work; she has also made occasional pencil annotations to the text itself. Fleming employed Anderson during the early 1960s to produce typescript copies from his manuscripts, a task which, as these letters show, she completed with much enjoyment and no small amount of difficulty; "I am sorry about not doing a chapter title number page... I'm sorry but do appreciate how much extra work I have given you and regret it very much". Nevertheless, she frequently passes thanks to Fleming for his generosity in maintaining her services and providing her with bonuses, and her questions (both in the body of some letters and in three sheets of queries, two of which concern On Her Majesty's Secret Service) show an astute eye for inaccuracies and inconsistencies. For example, Anderson questions M's profuse swearing in Chapter 17 of the present work, given that he had previously been described to seldom swear, "except when he thought he was sending one of his men to their death" (Anderson). "On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the second and final novel typed for Ian Fleming by Margaret Anderson, after which Fleming's regular typist Jean Frampton returned" (Gilbert, p. 352). In her initial letter, dated 23 December 1960, Anderson comments on the first work she typed for Fleming: not a Bond novel but rather State of Excitement: Impressions of Kuwait, which Fleming wrote as a guest of the Kuwait Oil Company the same month. Although that work seemed destined for Fleming's travelogue Thrilling Cities (1963), the government of Kuwait soon prevented its publication after objecting to "certain mild comments and criticisms" (Fleming, quoted in Gilbert, p. 589). It remains unpublished. As Anderson informs Fleming's secretary, "we've always enjoyed his books and although [Impressions of Kuwait] is different from his novels his racy style still keeps coming through". 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 A11a (1.1); The Schøyen Collection No. 85. Ian Fleming, State of Excitement: Impressions of Kuwait, manuscript held at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.