A $4,000 1947 Bond 'Field Guide'
11/13/2020
At an auction of Ian Fleming-related books and manuscripts that ended on Wednesday, Sotheby's sold a signed copy of James Bond's 1947 edition of Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies for 3,000 pounds (approx. $4,000).
This was the first signed Bond field guide that came up for sale at a prominent auction (that I'm aware of), and the first thing I wondered was whether the signature was authentic.
When I compared the signature and inscription to other signatures and hand-written notes by Bond, my thinking it that is likely genuine, although this was the first "Jim Bond" signature I've seen. (He usually signed his letters "Jim" or "James Bond.")
Bond also dated his correspondence in a similar fashion.
Here's what I think the inscription reads:
Jan. 17th 1958
Let's hope for (more?) and a successful day birding here on Tobago or in the Antilles!
Jim Bond
I know that Bond and his wife visited Trinidad (to visit William Beebe) a half-month later. In fact, at the bottom of this post are photos of Jim Bond and his wife Mary with the famed naturalist at his field station, Simla, in Trinidad. (More on Beebe here.)
One of the photos (courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia) is dated Feb. 2, 1958.
P.S. I would love for the new owner of the book to contact me.
Footnote: The Sotheby's writeup calls the book Field Guide to Birds in the West Indies. The dust jacket calls it Field Guide of Birds of the West Indies. And the book itself is called Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies.
Here's the writeup from the auction:
Description
JAMES BOND
FIELD GUIDE OF BIRDS IN THE WEST INDIES. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 1947
8vo, FIRST EDITION THUS, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR (“Jan, 17th 1958 | Let’s hope for more and a | successful day’s birding here on Tobago | or in the Antilles! | Jim Bond”) on half-title, colour illustrated frontispiece, one black and white illustrated plate, additional black and white vignette illustrations throughout text, original brown cloth, lettered in black, map endpapers, annotations in pencil throughout, one in pen, DUST-JACKET, collector’s green cloth folding case.
"IT STRUCK ME THAT THIS BRIEF, UN-ROMANTIC, ANGLO-SAXON AND YET VERY MASCULINE NAME WAS JUST WHAT I NEEDED, AND SO A SECOND JAMES BOND WAS BORN"
A COPY OF THE BOOK THAT GAVE JAMES BOND HIS NAME.
James Bond was an American ornithologist and the leading authority on birds of the West Indies for decades. This book was originally published as Birds of the West Indies in 1936. Fleming owned a copy of this book at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica, where he sat down to write Casino Royale in 1952. The author explained:
"I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard." (Ian Fleming, The New Yorker, 21 April 1962)
Years later, Fleming wrote in a letter to Mrs. Bond: "In return, I can only offer you or James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purpose you may think fit. Perhaps one day your husband will discover a particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion by calling it Ian Fleming" (The New York Times, 17 February 1989)
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