Ian Fleming

I've started an Ian Fleming library; obviously incomplete, but interesting.

Fun!

Source?

Check the profile.

Apparently, there are some 600 of Fleming's books at The Lilly Library. Perhaps the entire Lilly list will someday be available online, or maybe we can find a tenacious Hoosier biblionerd (said lovingly) to hand it off to.

Would be a cool flash-mob cataloging quest. Anyone want to talk to them about it?

I don't see it in the catalog, but it is known that Fleming owned a copy of Birds of the West Indies, by (drumroll) James Bond, and he has been quoted as saying that's where he got the name. It would be a shame if it were omitted.

Nice! Wikipedia has the same anecdote, referenced in James Bond: The Man and His World so maybe someone can pull a citation from there.

Heh. There was a copy of that book at the Boston fair last weekend. I don't think it was Fleming's copy ... but now I'm wishing I'd thought to check!

>7 lorax:
Added it!

http://www.librarything.com/work/details/38447830

I'll be in Bloomington, Indiana next month for a few days. Is there anything I can do for this project while I'm there?

>11 Katya0133:
Maybe see if they have a hard copy list of those 600 books? If not, you could enter a couple of books while you're there, sort of like "counting coup" for LLers! You want the password?

>sort of like "counting coup" for LLers!

HA!

Yeah, go ahead and send me the password. In the meantime, I'll try and get in contact with someone from their special collections department to see what they have in the way of documentation.

>5 BOB81:

BOB, can you show me where it says that there are 600 of Fleming's books at the Lilly? I'd like to reference that information when I contact the library, but I didn't see it when I scanned the catalog.

>14 Katya0133:

This is probably where I got it:

http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/overview/medicine.shtml

OK, I've sent an inquiry about the rest of the books to the Lilly. I'll let you know when I get a response.

The Lilly never got back to me, but after poking around I discovered that only 45% of the collection has been cataloged, but it can be accessed by doing an author search for Ian Fleming on IUCAT. (The author heading will appear as "Fleming, Ian, 1908-1964, former owner.") I got 248 records back this way, which is about 100 more than have currently been entered. Indiana University is one of the libraries we can add book from, so it shouldn't be too hard to add the rest of the books, but someone will have to de-dup the records, either before or afterwards.

I'll be in Indiana next week so I may be able to ask to see some of the books that haven't been added to the collection. I don't think I'll have time to record information for all ~300, though.

Thanks Katya! . . . but when I did an IUCAT keyword search for "Fleming, Ian, 1908-1964, former owner", I only came up with 195 records; when I tried "Fleming Ian former owner", I got 200: did I do something wrong?

OK, I started out by finding a record for a book that definitely wasn't by Fleming (Louis de Broglie's "Ondes et Mouvements"), then clicking on the link marked "Fleming, Ian, 1908-1964, former owner." However, it looks like those results included books either written by or owned by Fleming, not just the latter. When I do a search on "Fleming, Ian" as the author and "former owner" as keywords, I get 200 results, so I think that's the correct number. It'll also let you page through each record to double check it, so maybe you can page through and add at the same time?

page through and add at the same time

That sounds like the ticket.

Also, I was thinking, it would be neat if you could take a picture of some of the books, to post on the profile; and you gotta enter at least one of his books manually.

Oh, I'll definitely try to enter the books if I can (or record enough pub. info to enter them later).

I'll see what I can do about the pictures. I'm enough of a Luddite that I don't actually own a camera, but the friend I'm visiting may be able to oblige.

OK, I visited the Lilly today and talked to one of the reference librarians. She says that she doesn't know where the "600 books" figure comes from. That number may have been wrong in the first place or the Lilly may not have acquired Fleming's entire collection. Either way, she didn't know of any huge cache of "missing" books, although she did point me towards a list of scientific articles here that we can add to the library if we like. (I don't know if any of these were included in the exhibition catalog, though.)

There is an outside possibility that some of the volumes exist on catalog cards but haven't been retrospectively added to the online catalog yet. If that's the case, then we'll just have to wait for them to be added because there's no way of conveniently finding them in the card catalog.'

Bottom line: We need to go ahead and add the extra titles we found in the catalog, plus the scientific articles (if they aren't duplicates) and maybe check back every few years in the Lilly catalog to make sure no new books crop up!

"missing" books

Could you check behind the stairs? in the attic?

> 23

This is 007 we're talking about. They could be *anywhere*.

>24 DisassemblyOfReason:

Good point. They're probably in a top-secret invisible bookshelf under the care of a librarian named Prissy Buttons.

Katya, what are you doing in Bloomington—do tell.

This is 007 we're talking about. They could be *anywhere*.

They're probably at Spectre, where Blofeld is one by one feeding them to Piranhas.

I was in Bloomington to visit a college friend over spring break. (She's working on a PhD there.) But now I'm back in Orono, serving as Stephen King bait. ;)

I added all of the IUCAT books to Ian Fleming's library, so now there are over 300. I have yet to check the list of scientific articles to see if they need to be added. Also, I'd like to change his Russian books so the titles (and perhaps authors?) are in Cyrillic letters, if no one objects. (Transliterated Cyrillic is just annoying to try to read, imo.)

> Transliterated Cyrillic is just annoying to try to read

A pest!

I've Cyrilicized the book names. Does anyone care deeply about having the articles in there?

Articles seem like more trouble than they're worth. Maybe just a note on the profile page saying they exist and how to find them?

Agreed.

Sounds good. I'll add that when I get a chance.

Going through old threads. Is Fleming "done" to the extent that we know it now?

I think I looked over the articles and decided against adding them, so yes, I'd say we're done. (Or "done.")

Awesome. Marked :-)

Revived due to someone starting a new Fleming thread.