Books

1954. (New York; McCall Corporation May 1954). A US Softback Magazine Publication. Volume 99, No. 1. Contains a 39-page extract from Live and Let Die together with a superb, colour-illustrated front cover (by John Walton) sub-titled Voodoo Spy Novel: Live and Let Die. Cheap paper inevitably and pages lightly browned. Minor closed tears to the right hand edge of the front cover and some creasing to the covers and a touch of loss to the head and tail of the spine still a VG copy in full colour, full wrap-around pictorial wraps. Inside the magazine is clean without any writing. This magazine extract of Live and Let Die is important in that it is the first printing of Live and Let Die in the USA. The UK hardback first edition of Live and Let Die was published on May 5, 1954 and it was not published in the USA, as a first edition, until 1955. It is impossible to tell what date in May 1954 this edition of Bluebook Magazine was published but it is, irrefutably, the first US…

Live and Let Die is the second novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series of stories, and is set in London, the US and Jamaica. It was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1954. In the novel, Bond must defeat a dangerous drug lord with plans to finance Soviet espionage in America. The story was developed during Fleming's second stay in Jamaica, where he had extensive knowledge of the local scenery, wildlife, and underworld.