Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies

by James Bond

$16,000 · Offered by Burnside Rare Books

First edition · Signed

Philadelphia : The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1936. First edition. Signed on the dedication page by James Bond, the American ornithologist whose name Ian Fleming took for his iconic spy protagonist. Fleming, a keen birdwatcher himself, had a copy of Bond's guide and he later explained to the ornithologist's wife that It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.