I agree, CinemaRetro did a very nice 148-page square bound color magazine on DN some years ago and that’s plenty good enough for me. In fact, I think you can still get it, which considering how many of their other mags have sold out while this one never did maybe tells us how clever it is to try marketing a ridiculously expensive book on the same apparently extremely niche subject matter.
I love books, but I have come to realize that since I don’t live in a hermetically sealed pod, mine are slowly but surely succumbing to the forces of humidity, temperature changes and a gazillion other environmental factors, and sitting around worrying about that process is the way to madness. I refuse to spend a fortune on any tome that I’d have to secure in some kind of high-tech vault before I could sleep soundly at night. It doesn’t help that I’m not getting any younger and none of my heirs care a whit for Bond, so this wouldn’t even make sense as an investment.
This is typical of EON, forever marketing Bond in the form of high-end luxury items when the series is, artistically speaking, just the modern-day equivalent of a Captain Midnight serial. What we need is more accessible, fun merchandising and less pretension. (For instance, slapping a $300 price tag on swim trunks printed with Bond poster art doesn’t make them any less tacky than a $12 t-shirt from Spencer’s). I can’t imagine that on a Venn diagram, the crossover between persons with $1800 of disposable income and persons who want an EON-censored account of one 60+ year old Bond movie is all that huge.
Anyway, that’s my old man rant of the day. Keep your frisbee (and your razor-brimmed bowlers) off my lawn.
Yes, I think two versions, the original one (with the Dr. No filmcell) and the last one with the NTTD chapter. But maybe even three versions I’m not sure.
The most I ever spent on a Bond book was $300 for the Ian Fleming Bibliography by John Gilbert. I consider that money well spent because the book was definitive and without it I couldn’t have tracked down many of Fleming’s articles and interviews.
I already have the excellent Cinema Retro issue on Dr. No. Furthermore, I see that James Chapman published a book on the film in 2022. I haven’t read it yet, but the reviews are pretty good. And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the new Taschen book.
Completely forgot about Chapman’s book, I must still have it somewhere. I’m so behind on reading. I need to have everything, but then let it gather dust.
I don’t think Taschen would attempt a book on every Bond film. For one thing, I don’t think this one will sell, but more than that I think just in general the further you move forward in the series, the less interested people are. I know with Taschen’s “James Bond Archive,” I burned through the chapters up to TLD, slowed to a crawl in the Brosnan era, took about two months to get through QoS and the rest of the book remains unread all these years later.
I did however hope Cinema Retro’s “Dr No” mag was the start of what would be a series but, again, given it’s been a good number of years now and they still have copies in stock, I don’t think that’s going to happen, either.
A general word of advice about the so-called ‘coffee table books’: Think long and hard which ones to buy. This goes for any kind of interest, Bond, cinema, art, architecture and so on. How often do you really pick up one of these and browse through the pages?
I have several book cases full of hefty tomes covering my respective interests - and there are whole years when I don’t touch any of them. These days I wonder whether this type of book exists for any other purpose than making the interiors of Architectural Digest seem actually lived in. I doubt it.
The Archives book can luckily be purchased for half that price through Amazon, but the Ken Adam book will forever be stuck at that high price because it has the autograph of a man who can’t sign autographs anymore.
I say release a version without the autograph so us mere mortals can purchase and learn from it and enjoy it.
It really is a shame about that one, because I’m sure it’s a great book.
On the other hand, I do have a number of Ken Adam books (some of them weren’t exactly cheap, but ridiculous compared to this one), I do have my Ken Adam autograph, and the Ken Adam Archive is available online
