You Only Live Twice (Presentation copy)

London: Jonathan Cape, 1964. First edition. Fine/Near Fine. First impression, first state (the copyright page giving "First Published 1964" rather than "First Published March 1964"), presentation copy to Cyril Connolly, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To 'Great Ox' Connolly-san, from 'Butterfly' Fleming-san". This is one of eighteen known presentation copies recorded by Gilbert "from the early bound stock." Fleming had first met Connolly at Eton. They met again in Kitzbühel in Austria during 1938, when "Connolly arrived in town in pursuit of a woman...who turned out to be Ian's first girlfriend" (Lycett, p. 92). Over subsequent years, Fleming "had grown to like Connolly - one of his few journalistic colleagues of whom that could be said - and had played a part in confirming his appointment to the Sunday Times's panel of regular book reviewers" (Lycett, p. 224). In 1952 Connolly wrote The Missing Diplomats, concerning the Cambridge spy ring, and this was published by Fleming's Queen Anne Press. Connolly was also responsible for a spoof short story, first published in the London Magazine in 1963 entitled "Bond Strikes Camp." The story "lampooned the duplicitous, often sexually ambivalent world of espionage...while giving voice to the often quietly held view that, for all his apparent machismo, Bond was actually rather camp" (Lycett, p. 416). Connolly's use of the Bond character had, in a break from usual practice, been specifically permitted by Fleming. The inscription includes Fleming's use of the Japanese honorary title "san," used as a mark of respect as in the novel (Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese Secret Service, refers to 007 throughout as "Bondo-san").

A Fine copy in a Near Fine jacket. Octavo. Original black boards (Gilbert's binding A), spine lettered in silver, Japanese lettering on front cover in gilt, patterned endpapers. With the dust jacket. Housed in a custom black full morocco folding box. Tiny spots of rubbing to extremities of boards; jacket unclipped, spine slightly toned, else sharp.

You Only Live Twice was the final Bond book published during the lifetime of Fleming, who died later that year. It is the final volume in the "Blofeld trilogy" and was based on Japanese material which Fleming gathered during his five-week foreign jaunt for the Sunday Times. The novel is titled after a poem by Basho: "You only live twice: / Once when you are born, / And once when you look death in the face" (p. 7). The film adaptation was released three years later, starring Sean Connery, and with the screenplay written by Roald Dahl.

Gilbert A12a (1.2). Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming, 1995. Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.