FLEMING, Ian.

£195,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Corrected typescript of You Only Live Twice. The typescript of the penultimate James Bond novel, with extensive autograph corrections and additions by Ian Fleming. A manuscript of major scholarly importance, it documents Fleming's final, detailed revision of You Only Live Twice (1964), the first Bond novel written after the film series began in 1962 and one that clearly reflects Sean Connery's screen portrayal of the character.Fleming drafted the novel in January-February 1963 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. That original 170-page manuscript is held at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. He then produced a revised typescript of 160 pages, sent to his typist Jean Frampton in April 1963, with instructions to prepare eight copies (probably two sets of four), yielding two top copies and six carbons. As Jon Gilbert notes, these comprised "65,000 words on numbered leaves, typed on folio paper (rectos only), twenty-five lines to the page, double-spaced". Further copies were required during production; while the total number remains uncertain, Rank Xerox was commissioned to produce photocopies in June 1963.The present manuscript - on leaves measuring 254 mm, incorporating a small number of Xerox pages and bearing editorial corrections in at least two hands - is therefore one of the publisher's production copies and represents the final stage at which Fleming revised the text before it went to press.The opening page, a list of Fleming's works, survives as a top typed copy. The

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