Casino Royale

8vo., black publisher’s boards, lettered typographically in red to spine, with publisher’s device to foot, and a red heart embossed to the centre of upper board; the unclipped pictorial dustwrapper (13s. 6d. net to front flap) featuring a vibrant ‘playing card’ design in red, green and black; pp. [iv], 5-218, [ii]; a very good copy with some mottling to the upper board; spine tips lightly pushed, and slight shelf-lean; endpapers a touch spotted and offset, with a few marks to the outer edges of the text block; the good to very good dustwrapper toned and spotted, particularly to the lower panel, with some nicks, chips and short closed tears to extremities; a little rubbed, creased and darkened along folds; completely unrestored, and the upper panel remaining for the most part bright. 

Third impression of this new edition/reissue, which appeared in the same year as the true first and featured a newly-designed dustwrapper by Pat Marriott (uncredited). Marriott was Cape’s preferred artist at the time, having just produced the drawings for the wrapper of Diamonds are Forever (published 1956). She would also go on to illustrate the wrapper of Dr No in 1958. 

Fleming’s debut novel was written while he was residing at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, and was penned, in his own words, “to take my mind off other matters”. Inspired by the likes of Dornford Yates, E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Buchan, and newly released from his job in Naval Intelligence, Fleming set about on a quest to write ‘the spy novel to end all spy novels’. In it, he poured his experiences during the war - including his travels to the Rockefeller centre to microfilm Japanese code books, his trip to the Casino at Estoril where he lost to a Portuguese businessman, and his love of a ‘vesper’ cocktail - and he took as his protagonist’s name James Bond. It was a “brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine” name, he later wrote.

It is increasingly scarce to find this early edition in any condition.   

SKU: 1800172