This amazing Italian comic book cover for Ian Fleming’s Missione Royal, aka Casino Royale, with excellent cover art by Franco Picchioni, was printed in 1965. We found it over at the blog illustrated007, and there are other items there worth taking a look at if you’re inclined. Casino Royale was the first James Bond adventure written by Ian Fleming, but when it eventually hit the big screen in 1967 it was a Royale with cheese. Or more accurately, it wasn’t a Royale at all because it was a spoof that had nothing in common with Fleming’s work except the title and some characters. Still though, in its own way it was a good movie. But this cover reminds us that one thing we like about Bond as written by Fleming is his seriousness. Fleming more than once described Bond as having a “cruel mouth.” This doppleganger of Sean Connery has a cruel everything. No compassion in those eyes at all. We love it.

Since we were just on the subject of classic dust jackets, it seems a good time to post this first edition jacket of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. We put together a post of Bond first editions a while back, but left this one out because it was thematically different. Those others Bonds are some of the best covers we’ve ever seen, but this hypothetical, two-suited playing card has a certain charm of its own. Speaking of which, when contemplating what to title this post we remembered that most people think of a card trickster as a “card shark,” but “sharp” is actually the older term, though both are accurate. Just FYI. Check our other Bond dust jackets here. 

Above, five pulp pieces from illustrator J. Oval, including Ronald Kirkbride’s bestseller A Girl Named Tamiko (with its suspiciously non-Japanese-looking cover subject), and two from Sergeanne Golon’s famed Angélique series. Sergeanne Golon was actually a pseudonym for French author Anne Golon and her Russian husband/historical researcher Serge, aka Vsevolod Sergeïvich Goloubinoff. J. Oval was a pseudonym for artist Ben Ostrick, who was a major illustrator of both books and magazine articles in the 1950s and 1960s. These covers are circa late 1958 to 1962.  

Above is the cover of a December 1963 Uncensored, with Ava Gardner, Richard Burton, Carroll Baker and Steve McQueen. Inside, you get them, plus Suzy Parker, Elizabeth Taylor, Gemel Abdel Nasser, Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Ursula Andress, Sean Connery, and the great Jean Seberg. And as a bonus, you can learn about hypnotism. We did it, and it really works. *wiggling fingers* Yooou will retuuurn to our website eeeevery daaaay. See all of our Uncensored posts here.

Below, nine first edition hardback dust jackets for Ian Fleming's James Bond series, by British illustrator Richard Chopping. You can see another first edition, Dr. No by artist Pat Marriot, at the top of a previous post here.

Our recent post of Dr. No promo art got us thinking about the popularity of the Ian Fleming novel, so today we’ve compiled a collection of Dr. No covers detailing their evolution through the years. At top is an original 1958 hardback with art by Pat Marriot, worth about $150 in mint condition, and at bottom is a 2007 hardback reprint from Penguin featuring art from Michael Gillette and Jon Gray. In between are thirteen more covers spanning the intervening forty-nine years. Some items in the collection are more evocative than others, but they are all worthy. We'll post more of these as we locate them.

Today in 1964, Goldfinger opened in the United States. It was the third outing for 007, and the one that truly established Sean Connery as a global cinematic icon. The characters’ names are still the most delightful in all Bondage—Pussy Galore, Oddjob, and of course Auric Goldfinger, the man with the Midas touch, as Shirley Bassey so memorably sang in the theme song. One could easily argue that there have only been five good Bond movies. Goldfinger was certainly among that group.