James Fleming (1944–2024)
What does an editor do? The editor of the Book Collector in recent years was James Fleming – a nephew of the Ian Fleming who wrote those sensationally successful novels. (You know the ones.) As it happens, Ian Fleming also founded the Book Collector, in 1952. Not bad going.
James described the task of editing this compendious quarterly journal in quite simple terms. There were articles to procure and edit. There were images to source. An editor had to tally up the pages and deal with the reviews of new books and bookdealers’ catalogues . . .
And so on, taking in the BC’s digital activities (which in recent years have run to podcasting and an Instagram account) and signing off printed gatherings of each issue with the printer (a more traditional task). But James’s list also included, characteristically, “Have ideas for Bond and any new publications” – he could hardly help but be aware of how deep interest in this subject could go. And it ended on a characteristic note: “Think about things”.
I’m using the past tense here because on November 22 James died, at the age of eighty. I’d seen him a few weeks earlier at the Chelsea Book Fair, when the rest of the editorial board had been around, too (yes, I have skin in that game); the conversation had pleasantly covered everything from Freud in translation to TLS covers (of which he didn’t approve), mixed with plans for future issues of the BC and the promise of further meetings.
It’s a melancholy thought that we won’t be having those meetings or discussing those plans. Fuller tributes will appear, I’m sure, but for now a glance at the covers reproduced here of some issues of the BC under James should give an idea of what he accomplished in this line. (He was a writer of several well-received novels, among other things.)
These BC covers should also give an idea of the sheer variety of subjects that the editor of such a journal has to compass (though there isn’t really a journal that’s exactly the same). Polar exploration or fore-edge painting, say, illustrations to Dracula or rarities by Sylvia Plath. It’s a crucial editorial knack, I reckon, this feeling your way around such disparate notions, and finding pleasing ways to arrange in an issue (or across many issues in the case of certain long-running series). To my eye, James had that knack.
Collectors of Bondiana will be wanting a copy of James’s short book Bond behind the Iron Curtain, published a few years ago. But rather than 007, I’ll end with some advice for aspiring book collectors he offered in an interview published in 2017, which seems pretty sound to me:
First, don’t collect specifically for profit. Collect what interests you, collect it well, and profit will naturally accrue. But what? you ask. Isn’t everything very expensive? I mean, £30,000 for a Casino Royale is not exactly peanuts, is it? Indeed. So look around. Why not Brexit literature? Why not Sunken Cities (with an eye to climate change)? Why not Apocalypse, starting with the Middle Ages? There are always areas waiting to be discovered and collected – always.
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ICYMI: Daniel Crouch Rare Books is offering for sale the Adrian Naftalin collection of more than 1,000 cartographical items relating to the Holy Land. Notable items include early editions of Ptolemy’s Geographia and The asking price: $2 million. The free option? This carto-bibliographically inspired Advent calendar. But there’s also the catalogue of the Naftalin collection – an education in itself.
