Ian Fleming
It was in 1929 that Ian Fleming, strolling down Bond Street as only a confident twenty-one year old can, saw a book by D.H. Lawrence in the window of the antiquarian bookseller, Dulau. He went in and buttonholed one of the employees. It was Percy Muir. By the time that Fleming died, thirty-five years later, Muir has assembled for his friend a single-subject collection of books second, almost, to none. The subject? It had been Fleming who’d come up with the idea, which was as brilliant as it was unusual: that Muir find for him first editions of books that marked milestones of progress in western civilisation. Penicillin, golf, bicycles, soccer, bridge, communism, the atomic bomb, the boy scout movement, television - anything that had been first published after 1800.
The brief was not easy. Many scientific advances saw the light of day in fragile pamphlets of only a few pages. But prices were low for no one else was looking for this sort of material. On the Origin of Species was bought for £10, Einstein’s statement of his general relativity theory for £1 5s 0d and the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei 1848 for £94. The idea expanded, the collection blossomed. When the historic exhibition, ‘Printing and the Mind of Man’ took place in July 1963, Fleming was the second largest lender after King’s College, Cambridge (the beneficiaries of Maynard Keynes). Upon Fleming’s death in 1964, the collection was bought by the Lilly Library of Bloomington, Indiana, together with the Bond manuscripts and associated works.
The best reference book, which deals with all aspects of Fleming’s book collecting, is the Spring 2017 issue of The Book Collector (288 pp., many illustrations), which is still available through our Bookstore. The following are the articles it contains:
- My Uncle Ian James Fleming
- Ian Fleming and The Book Collector Fergus Fleming
- Books That Had Started Something: Ian Fleming’s Book Collection Joel Silver
- The Death of ‘The Doctor’: Ian Fleming intervenes James Fergusson
- Printing and the Mind of Man: a Magnificent Affair
- Percy Muir: Ian Fleming’s Bookseller Nicolas Barker
- Friendship and Fiction: Ian Fleming and Robert Harling A.S.G. Edwards
- James Bond Invades America: A Tale of Three Publishers John Cork
- Collecting Ian Fleming: The Making of a Bibliography Jon Gilbert
- Two Bond Collectors: Michael VanBlaricum & Jeremy Miles: Sheila Markham
- The Bond Market: an 007 Price Index James Fergusson
Fleming died in 1964. The following year The Book Collector was taken on by Nicolas Barker who over the next fifty years raised it to its present high standard. In 2016 ownership reverted to the Fleming family.

The Book Collector is a literary journal founded by Ian Fleming in 1952. We publish quarterly and in addition to our articles, we carry news about booksellers and their catalogues, book reviews, interviews with librarians and obituaries of scholars and collectors. Our archive contains all our work since the beginning. Like our founder, we are as no other.
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James Fleming
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