"You only live twice: Once when you are born, And once when you look death in the face."
FLEMING, Ian. You Only Live Twice. London: Jonathan Cape. 1964.
8vo. Original cloth; Japanese figures lettered to upper cover in gold; lettered in silver to spine; chopping jacket; wood-effect endpapers; pp. 256; endpapers lightly offset; slight compression to spine tips and corners; edges with light spotting; the jacket lightly toned along the backstrip and folds, with some nicking and minor chipping to head; still a near-fine copy in a very good unrestored jacket.
First edition, first state, binding A as in Gilbert. The last of the Bond novels to be published in Fleming's lifetime, and the concluding chapter in the subsequently named 'Blofeld Trilogy'.
On 17 July 1963, Michael Howard of Jonathan Cape had written to Chopping about the artwork, saying: "I have had a talk with Ian about the ideas for the ingredients of this design. He is very much in favour of the toad … but with a suitable array of oriental embellishrangment, i.e. toad plus Japanese flower arrangements, which he thinks should be sitting in a suitable piece of Japanese pottery, perhaps ornamented with a dragon motif. If you could manage a pink dragonfly sitting on the flowers, and perhaps just one epicanthic eye peering through them he thinks that will be just splendid!"(Daily Mail). Chopping's fee subsequently rose to 300 guineas for the jacket design.
Gilbert A12a(1.1).
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