94 BAUMAN RARE BOOKS “I Would Remember Him Forever As My Image Of A Man” “A Naked Arm Smelling Of Chanel No. 5 Snaked Round His Neck…” 137FLEMING, Ian. The Man With the Golden Gun. London, 1965. Octavo, original black paper boards, dust jacket. $1500 First edition of Fleming’s final Bond novel, published the year after the author’s death. Because Fleming wrote this Bond adventure while ill—the author “was only able to work on it for one and a half hours a day”—the publisher hired novelist Kingsley Amis to complete and revise it (Black, 75). Second-issue binding, without gilt-embossed gun on front cover, as usual; the first-issue binding is extremely rare. Book fine, dust jacket very nearly so. “I Love Its Colour, Its Brilliance, Its Divine Heaviness… The Power That Gold Alone Gives” 138FLEMING, Ian. Goldfinger. London, 1959. Octavo, original gilt-stamped black paper boards, dust jacket, custom box. $6800 First edition of the seventh James Bond thriller, in which Fleming’s superspy thwarts Auric Goldfinger’s plot to plunder Fort Knox. “Written when Fleming was on top of his game,” Goldfinger “is not only the longest entry in the [Bond] series but also one of the most exuberant, and garnered a certain degree of credibility in literary circles when author Anthony Burgess listed it in his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939” (Gilbert, 230). Faint spotting to text block edges only, cloth fine; dust jacket with shallow rub to upper corner, a hint of creasing at head of mildly toned spine. A lovely, near-fine copy. 136FLEMING, Ian. The Spy Who Loved Me. London, 1962. Octavo, original silver-stamped brown paper boards, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $3000 First edition of Fleming’s tenth Bond thriller. As he had while composing From Russia, With Love (1957) and Thunderball (1961), the author again toyed with the idea of killing off Bond. Fleming “did not regard Bond as a heroic figure ‘but only as an efficient professional in his job.’ Therefore he had sought to write a ‘cautionary tale’ to put the record straight, particularly for his younger readers. Unable to do this in his usual narrative style, he had invented a heroine ‘through whom I could examine Bond from the other end of the gun barrel, so to speak’” (Lycett, 401-02). Book fine, dust jacket lightly foxed.
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