THE SPY
WHO LOVED
THE LONDON LIBRARY Any links between the Library and the world’s most famous secret agent have hitherto being subject to the Official Secrets Act. Now, on the 60th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, and the publication of Solo, William Boyd’s chronicle of 007’s adventures, all can be revealed, as Peter Ettedgui explains. On a melancholic afternoon towards the end of 1962, St James’s Square carpeted with snow, it appears that a copy of Burke’s General Armory (1962 edn) – a standard work for scholars of heraldry – was borrowed from The London Library. Franked 10 December, the hefty tome was duly slipped into the luggage of secret agent (and, we may infer, Library member) James Bond as he packed for his new mission in Switzerland. Burke is not perhaps the kind of reading matter one immediately associates with 007, but it was essential to the business at hand, for Bond was about to assume the guise of a genealogist investigating a dubious claim to the medieval French title, ‘Comte de Bleuville’. On arrival at the pretender’s alpine retreat, Bond would unmask him as none other than his great nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and foil an insidious plot to unleash biological warfare on the UK. Which is all very well, but what – members might reasonably enquire – of the Library’s copy of Burke’s General Armory? Perusing the catalogue half a century later, I’m afraid I must report that there is no record of it ever having been returned. Judging from the official chronicle
of the mission (which, unlike Burke, is still available to members, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming, 1963, Fiction), it seems that Bond, his cover blown, was unable to retrieve the volume from his guest quarters in Blofeld’s mountain-top complex before making good his escape on skis. In mitigation: the book surely would have weighed him down, perhaps fatally, on that perilous descent, under heavy gunfire from the thugs in hot pursuit. We can only assume that the General Armory was, like much of the ordnance with which Bond is equipped by his Quartermaster, a casualty of the mission. Quite possibly, it was incinerated when 007 later returned to Switzerland with a fleet of helicopters to blow up Blofeld’s alpine retreat. Bond’s apparent failure to return Burke notwithstanding, this episode implies that the Library has played a more significant role in his extraordinary career than previously suspected. Whereas more than one critic has suggested that Bond, entirely lacking an inner life, would have no use for books, I beg to differ. The routine nature of his acquisition of Burke suggests this was nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, every self-respecting 007 scholar knows that
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