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I can understand the frustration.
I am, however, going to wave a scrap of the IFP flag here. They've put out some very nice limited edition collectables for not much money at all in recent years. I'm thinking of the Higson signed special edition paperback for a tenner, and the signed Sherwood second book with the little extras for the price of the standard book. They even put out a smart paperback of Benson's Zero Minus Ten for a tenner a year or so ago.
I can understand that people want more new literary Bond adventures, (as do I), but I think we should also recognise that IFP haven't tried to milk the literary Bond fans when it comes to collectable editions. In that respect, good for them.
Two days ago I ordered a hardback Casino Royale off IFP for £24.00. I think there's only 250 being printed. How much was that recent Folio limited CR edition? Five hundred quid or summat?
A decent article about the recent Bond book publishing and re-publishing. They don't use many of the continuation novels, is my only criticism of the article.
Also, do we think we'll get an announcement of some kind for James Bond Day (October 5)?
I think the endpapers design is really cool.
From what I've read elsewhere, these are the recently censored texts, so the text of the LALD is the old American one. The bonus material consists of letters by Fleming. Most have appeared in The Man With the Golden Typewriter, but a few are being published for the first time, though exactly which ones is still a mystery.
EDIT: Eight titles contained letters that previously appeared in Typewriter:
CR : 03/04/59, FA Taylor
LALD : 01/04/54, Winston Churchill
MR : 18/08/59, Major VP Tallon
DAF : 08/11/57, Miss M Marshall
FRWL : 09/07/56, Daniel George
DN : 14/10/58, W Speid
FYEO : 25/06/59, Miss Noella Moneypenny
OHMSS : 31/07/62, Michael Howard
As for the letters and other bonus material in the remaining 6 titles:
GF : 28/12/59, William Birnie (re: golf)
TB : The Domino Letter, originally published letter in the Pan paperback.
TSWLM: 18/04/62, Florence Taylor and 29/05/62, Kenneth Robinson. Both refer to criticism of the book,
YOLT: A one-page note detailing Fleming’s travel research for the novel, with thanks to friends and a short bibliography.
TMWTGG : 19/07/61. Answers to the "Six Questions" feature in Queen Magazine (you can read it here).
OP : 31/10/61, Captain EK Le Mesurier of the NRA (National Rifle Association), regarding weapons used in TLD.
I'd say the TSWLM extras sound most interesting, given how wounded Fleming was by the book's reception and how he tried to defend it.
In more interesting literary news, Talk of the Devil: The Collected Writings of Ian Fleming will be made available as a mass market edition on May 25, 2025. For more than a decade it was only available as an extra to the very expensive collected edition of Fleming's works from Queen Anne Press. A few copies were offered via QAP for purchase last year, but the new edition will be affordable and available to everyone.
Thanks for all that, a very interesting and informative post. I always feel that they're taking the easy way out by using "the American text that Fleming approved" with LALD, but I think I'm expecting too much to think they'd go with the original English text while we move through this period of intense sensitivity.
I doubt we'll see reprints of the original texts appearing in the mainstream anytime soon.
I won't be buying these beyond the Casino special edition, as nice as the covers are. And once again I say, pip-rah to the people at Folio editions, who stick to the original text, knowing that their readers are grown-ups and understand context. (Now get a wiggle-on with Octopussy and the Living Daylights, eh?).
I think the best Fleming extras we've seen thus far are the TV drafts in the first two Horowitz books. They were a bit special.