Description
Bond, James. Birds of the West Indies. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985) Fourth edition on DJ, Fifth American on copyright page (not an uncommon state).
Duodecimo. 256 pages, illustrated in color and black/white. Hardcover in dust jacket. Bound in green cloth covered boards with illustrated endpapers.
Condition: VG+. Dj is price clipped. Previous owner’s name and address stamped to ffe, pen notation stating it came from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Binding solid with no lean. DJ spine sunned.
Birds of the West Indies is known not only for its exhaustive study of Caribbean birds, but also because the name of the book’s author, the ornithologist James Bond, which was used by Ian Fleming for the name of his fictional British secret agent, Commander James Bond.
Fleming, a keen bird watcher while living at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, owned the book. He later explained that he chose the name of its author for the hero of his first Bond novel Casino Royale in 1953, because he wanted a name that sounded ‘as ordinary as possible’. Fleming wrote to the real Bond’s wife, “It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born.” – jamesbondlifestyle.com
