James Bond 007 Ian Fleming The first book covers for the Ian Fleming, James Bond series featured the most imaginative trompe-l’oeil drawings by the British illustrator, Richard Chopping.
Chopping was commissioned for the dust jacket drawings by Ian Fleming after he saw the artist’s works on the cover of his own book ‘The Fly’. Trompe-l’oeil essentially means a trick on the eye, and as demonstrated with Chopping’s works for the 007 series, highly realistic three-dimensional images.
James Bond 007 Ian Fleming
Would these dust jackets help sales today? How are changing times reflected in book cover styles and approaches. Look at the early Penguin orange covers. Would this work today or do we look out for things more sensational? Those covers that leap off the shelves at us. I would have thought that a return to these dust jacket styles would be a hit amongst the reading customer, especially with the hint of nostalgia.
The striking skull design for Goldfinger– one of Chopping’s personal favourites, was apparently a commission that had been declined by his former friend and subsequent arch-rival, Lucian Freud.
The dust jackets are featured at the Salisbury Museum, Wiltshire until Autumn 2021. The images here have been photographed from postcards purchased at the museum as well as copied from the Internet.
There is very little information about Richard Chopping on the Internet, so below are just a few gleanings about him.
Richard Chopping (14 April 1917-17 April 2008) was born in Colchester, Essex and educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, UK.
Chopping’s life partner was the landscape painter Denis Wirth-Miller (born 27 November 1915, died 27 October 2010) [1] . The two were the first couple to register a Civil Partnership in Colchester. They lived in Wivenhoe for over sixty years and were the founders of an artist community which counted Francis Bacon as a member.
During the 1940s, Chopping established himself as an author and illustrator of natural history and children’s books. His early work includes Butterflies in Britain (1943), A Book of Birds (1944), The Old Woman and the Pedlar (1944), The Tailor and the Mouse (1944), Wild Flowers (1944), Heads, Bodies & Legs with Denis Wirth-Miller (1946), and the collection of short stories Mr Postlethwaite’s Reindeer (1945).
Chopping’s first novel, The Fly (Secker & Warburg, 1965) was recommended to its publisher by Angus Wilson, where David Farrar found it “a perfectly disgusting concoction”. It was edited by Giles Gordon, who later wrote that he was determined to like the novel, hoping that “more, and no doubt better, books would follow. The Fly was indeed disgusting.” Gordon found Chopping “most fastidious” and his book “sufficiently sordid to appeal to voyeurs, and if Chopping were to adorn it with one of his famous dust-jackets it could be a succès de scandale; and so it proved.”
James Bond 007 Ian Fleming
Chopping’s second novel, The Ring (1967), was more mundane and much less successful. His short story The Eagle appears in the anthology Lie Ten Nights Awake (1967, ed. Herbert Van Thal). Source – Wikipedia.
James Bond 007 Ian Fleming