You Only Live Twice

FIRST EDITION, First Issue, half title, text block clean, publishers black cloth, title silver on spine, gilt on top board in kanji, dust jacket designed by Richard Chopping, corners clipped, slight creasing and chipping around spine head and tail and corners, spine slightly toned, preserved with a transparent removable covering, 8vo, London, Jonathan Cape, 1964.

“A ‘world-famous secret agent’: it seems a contradiction in terms. Yet how else to describe Bond – James Bond- whose exploits have sold over sixty million books to date, and launched one of the most successful film franchises in the world? Few other literary characters can claim to have had the cultural impact of 007.” Ian Fleming Publications LTD.

You Only Live Twice is the eleventh Bond novel and the last published in Fleming’s lifetime. It is the concluding volume of the ‘Blofeld Trilogy’. The novel deals on a personal level with the change in Bond from a depressed man in mourning, to a man of action bent on revenge, to an amnesiac living as a Japanese fisherman. Through the mouths of his characters, Fleming also examines the decline of post-World War II British power and influence, notably in relation to the United States.