Signed On Her Majesty's Secret Service: The 'Presentation' copies

Last week I revealed my progress tracing as many of the 250-signed On Her Majesty's Secret Service limited edition books as possible. The harder task is tracking the remaining un-numbered 35 'presentation' copies. But I've decided to give it a go:

After the response I had last week, from my blog detailing my quest to track down as many of the 250 limited edition Ian Fleming-signed On Her Majesty’s Secret Service books as possible, it seemed only fair that I should try and follow it up with detailing my initial efforts trying to trace the remaining books of the set – the 35 additional ‘presentation’ copies.

For reasons explained last week, the numbered books (250 in total), are by far the easiest to trace, by virtue of each of them having their truly unique identifying number.

Find a new one of these, tick it off, and Bob's your uncle.

By contrast, the 35 presentation copies (which simply say ‘Copy Number Presentation’), are not at all easy to determine, (hence why I'd not concentrated on this) - mainly because they are rife for double counting.

Take, for instance finding two records of sold examples just showing the front of the book. Who's to know if these aren't exactly the same book - just sold at different time - rather than being distinctly separate books?

This identification obstacle is why I’ve historically concentrated on finding the easier-to-spot first 250.

But, after last week, I realised it would be churlish not to at least have a bash at trying to find the parallel survival rates of what the presentation copies are – so that we can form more of a complete picture of the existence levels of the entire signed set.

I've decided that only reliable way to ‘count’ each of these books as being a distinct, surviving example, is to try and find a record of Ian Fleming’s specific signature per presentation book.

Differences in his scrawl are the easiest way of confirming that each book found is unique.

So, what have I found?

I’m only a few days into my research, so obviously it’s early days, but here’s my initial observations:

First: the bad news:

There are numerous listing of previous auction sales online, but this traditionally good first go-to source of information is a frustrating place. Many auction houses had/still have a nasty habit of not showing the presentation page itself – just a photo of the exterior of the book. This makes it very difficult to tell – short of trying to find minute identification marks on the outside of the book – if one book isn’t just the same as one sold a at a different time.

Second: the good news:

While trying to find evidence of the signed presentation copies, I actually found many more new (unbeknown to me), copies of the 1-250 numbered set that I hadn’t seen before.

It means I can now update last week’s blog and say that a significant number of new numbered copies have now been identified, and can be evidenced as existing.

These new are numbers:

2, 16, 20, 26, 35, 109 117, 121, 186, and the very last one (yes really) – number 250.

(Until I’d found number 250, the latest numbered book I’d been able to document was 236).

These new numbers can be added to the other additions – numbers 33 and 230 that were also supplied to me, direct by owners immediately after last week’s blog.

That’s a great result, my total of known numbered OHMSS books - with proof of existence - rises from the 63 we ended on last week to 75 this week.

If we’re still assuming 200 of the 250 numbered books survive, we’ve now got evidence that 37.5% of the numbered books believed to have survived have actually survived!

Back to the presentation copies…!

OK, I digress. Back to the presentation copy examples.

This is not going to be as exhaustive as last week’s blogs, as research time has been limited, but in a short few days I think I’ve done a decent job in finding a reasonable number so far – copies where Fleming’s signature reveals these books are definitely different to each-other, and so are part of the 35 book total.

Here’s what I’ve found:

From looking at actual photos of the Ian Fleming signature, I can identify 7 out of the maximum 35 made as distinctly different, and still around today.

That’s direct evidence that 20% of these books still exist (and that's assuming there hasn't been any wastage.

If we apply Jon Gilbert's rationale that up to 20% could have been lost of destroyed, then that brings the likely total down to just 28, meaning we know of exactly a quarter of them.

Not a bad result I say!

Because there's fewer of these presentation copies, below are pictures of each of the signature-identified books.

(Some are not – unfortunately – as high resolution as others, but you can see quite clearly that all the signatures are different):

It’s worth showing all of these, I feel, if only to showcase how genuine Ian Fleming signatures can look both similar, but also very different.

Studying these should give you a better eye for spotting any future so-called 'signed' material that you may see come onto the market.

As can be seen, we’ve got examples here where the middle section of ‘Fleming’ looks more like ww’s than an ‘m’; we see how the word ‘Fleming’ gets stretched out, and even breaks into two distinct halves in one of them.

We also see how the ‘F’ of Fleming can look very different – shown particularly in the middle two large signatures; plus numerous other points of difference and similarity.

We also see the 'g' of Fleming differ from being rounded, to quite rigid and straight, with flourishes both to the left and to the right.

What a headache for those trying to authenticate!!

Yes, broadly, the signatures all look similar, but the changes are quite stark between them!

So, do we think 7 is 'it' for these presentational copies - or are there more out there?

Well, undoubtedly, I do think there will be more to be found.

With some more research time, plus some additional cross referencing of external images of the books, I might well be able to reveal a few more.

I'll keep an eye on these books, and will occasionally do some other deep dives every so often to see if I can bump this number up.

My seven have been spotted with only a few hours research, so it's almost guaranteed that there will be others that have an as-yet un-found digital or catalogued footprint, just waiting to be discovered.

As ever, I'll keep you updated as I go along.

If you see any that you don't think are listed above, do let me know.

Maybe collectively we can find more of these wonderful books.