You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice (1964) – Ian Fleming

Jonathan Cape | First Edition | ISBN: None | Condition: Good | Slightly Wonky Spine

Sold by Crappy Old Books – Where James Bond Returns, Blofeld Gets Horticultural, and Even the Spine Has Been Shaken, Not Stirred.

There are bad days at the office, and then there is being James Bond, whose recent professional difficulties include the murder of his wife, the collapse of his emotional stability and an increasingly understandable reluctance to participate enthusiastically in the international espionage business.

Fortunately, British intelligence has a solution. Send him to Japan.

Because nothing says psychological recovery quite like dispatching a traumatised secret agent halfway around the world on a mission involving Japanese intelligence, mysterious arrangements, exotic dangers and a deranged criminal mastermind with an unusually enthusiastic approach to poisonous gardening.

Published in 1964, You Only Live Twice is Ian Fleming’s eleventh James Bond novel and one of the strangest, darkest and most fascinating instalments in the entire series. Here, Fleming exchanges some of the familiar glamour of casinos, cocktails and expensive European hotels for an extraordinary journey through Japanese culture, philosophy, espionage and mortality.

Bond is no longer simply the confident, womanising secret agent who can dispatch three assassins before breakfast and still complain about the quality of the scrambled eggs. He is a damaged man, struggling with grief and professional decline, sent eastward by M in the hope that an unusual assignment might restore something of his former effectiveness.

What follows is an increasingly bizarre adventure involving Japanese intelligence chief Tiger Tanaka, the mysterious Dr Guntram Shatterhand, a castle surrounded by deadly botanical specimens and a particularly unpleasant scheme that would make the average National Trust garden supervisor reconsider his career.

And somewhere beneath the disguises, cultural encounters and lethal vegetation lurks Bond’s old adversary, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Naturally, things become complicated.

The novel is also notable for Fleming’s fascination with Japan, filtered through the distinctly British perspective of a man whose observations can be perceptive, eccentric and gloriously dated, sometimes within the same paragraph. It is as much an exploration of identity, honour and the possibility of personal rebirth as it is a conventional thriller.

This copy is a 1964 Jonathan Cape first edition, making it a particularly appealing example of Fleming’s Bond fiction from the year of its original publication.

Condition: Good, with a slightly wonky spine. Yes, the spine has developed a modest deviation from the straight and narrow. Considering that the contents involve assassins, poison, international intrigue and the psychological destruction of Britain’s most famous secret agent, a slightly crooked backbone seems almost thematically appropriate.

It is not being presented as an immaculate collector’s specimen, but as a genuine first edition with character, history and an amusing little structural imperfection.

There is no ISBN, because in 1964 books were still perfectly capable of existing without fourteen separate identification systems and an online database.

Available from Crappy Old Books, where we appreciate a proper Fleming first edition, even when it refuses to stand quite as straight as an officer on parade.

A dark, distinctive Bond adventure, a desirable early publication, and a slightly wonky survivor of the swinging sixties.

You only live twice, apparently.

But you only get one original 1964 first edition. And this one has developed a bit of a lean.

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