FLEMING, Ian - CHOPPING, Richard.

£75,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Archive for the dust jacket of For Your Eyes Only. A series of 22 autograph and typed letters signed between Ian Fleming, his agent at Jonathan Cape Michael Howard, and Fleming's dust-jacket artist of choice Richard Chopping, documenting the conception and creation of Chopping's jacket design for For Your Eyes Only, also containing a number of drafts and colour palettes for the dust jacket, as well as a final sketch.Fleming was introduced to Chopping, then a young artist specializing in trompe-l'oeil paintings, by his wife Ann in 1956. Chopping designed almost all the James Bond jackets from Russia With Love onwards; he afterwards also designed the covers of the Amis and Gardner continuations. Fleming was a great supporter of Chopping's work, his enthusiasm overriding the concern of his editor at Cape over Chopping's escalating fees for the artwork - in this collection, the letters demonstrate Fleming's effusive support for Chopping's design, Howard's tactful rebuttal that the sum was too high, and Chopping's cordial yet insistent demands for his desired fees. The matter was resolved, Chopping's designs were used here and on the other novels, and the designs have become an iconic component of the Bond cultural phenomenon. This collection aptly details the production of and dispute over one of the most arresting examples, the eye-through-the-keyhole so familiar to Bond collectors.

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