In late 1959 Ian Fleming’s marriage was foundering and his James Bond novels were not tripping off the page as he would have liked. As an escape, he agreed to fly round the world, researching a travel book called Thrilling Cities. By November he was tiring of this “lunatic journey” too. Japan had demonstrated rather too starkly the limitations of British political power – the guiding light of his fictional agent 007’s career.

Fleming’s spirits were lifted by finding two recent issues of the Times Literary Supplement among the mail awaiting him in Los Angeles. He recalled reading the TLS en route to his next stop, Chicago: “In contrast with the mushy infant food of the American newspapers and magazines that had been my daily fare since arriving in America, I cannot describe the thrill of excitement with which I read a particularly devastating review of Miss Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed: I remember that the slashing broadside made me almost light-headed with pleasure”. Fleming looked back on this airborne pleasure in his introduction to a little-known 1933 novel, All Night at Mr Stanyhurst’s by Hugh Edwards, which he caused to be republished by Jonathan Cape in 1963. This whimsical book, described by fellow enthusiast James Agee as “the best long story or short novel since Conrad”, mixes the tale of a corrupt eighteenth-century rake with a nautical adventure, centred on a shipwreck.

The TLS was due this recognition, because in its pages he had alighted on a leading article, dated April 14, 1961, which discussed the phenomenon of books which had been revived after being unjustly forgotten by the reading public. (Among them were Brecht’s Threepenny Novel and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.) Several times Fleming had urged Cape, his own publisher, to reprint All Night at Mr Stanyhurst’s and several times it had demurred. But armed with the TLS leader, he, as Cape’s best-selling author, could no longer be denied. In his introduction, which Cape deemed essential to the reprint, Fleming wrote, “An essential item in my ‘Desert Island’ library would be The Times Literary Supplement, dropped to me each Friday by a well-trained albatross”.

Fleming’s literary interests began at Eton where he produced his own magazine, The Wyvern, and inveigled contributions from friends of his mother, including Augustus John (her lover), Vita Sackville-West and Oliver St John Gogarty. Fleming himself wrote a short story (his first in print), “The Ordeal of Caryl St George”, which he later described as “a shameless crib of Michael Arlen”. As a young man he wrote wispy sub-Byronic poetry which he collected in a book called The Black Daffodil. By his early twenties, he became so embarrassed by this work that he had all copies of the book destroyed.

Well before he dreamt of James Bond, Fleming began his book collection. Walking down Bond Street in 1929, he saw D. H. Lawrence’s Pansies in the window of Dulau’s. As he was travelling abroad, he arranged with the bookseller Percy Muir to be forwarded copies of new books. One of his first requests was transition, the avant-garde magazine produced in Paris by Harry Crosby and others.

Six years later, having made some money on the Stock Exchange, Fleming asked Muir, who had decamped to Elkin Matthews, to gather for him books which told the story of intellectual and technical progress since 1800. Muir purchased first editions of everything from The Origin of Species to Marie Stopes’s Married Love and Niels Bohr’s Quantum Theory. By 1963, Fleming’s library formed the largest contribution by any individual collector to the London exhibition Printing and the Mind of Man.

After the war, Fleming had joined the Sunday Times as Foreign Manager. He became a favourite of the paper’s owner, Lord Kemsley, who, knowing of his interest in books, invited him to become a director of the Dropmore Press, a small publishing imprint he owned, along with The Book Handbook, later The Book Collector, an occasional magazine for book enthusiasts which had been started by Reginald Horrox of Sotheby’s.

The Dropmore Press proved financially disastrous. When Kemsley wanted to divest himself of this folly, he offered both publishing company and magazine to Fleming, who in 1954 agreed to purchase Dropmore, now known as the Queen Anne Press. But the deal was never finalized and the imprint limped on with Bond’s creator as its director and leading light.

At the same time Fleming argued that The Book Collector was uncommercial but, having prevailed on a few rich collectors, including Paul Mellon, to underwrite the publication’s future, he took it off Kemsley’s hands for £50. As with the Queen Anne Press, he ran the magazine with his friends Percy Muir and John Hayward, the scholar, bibliophile and one-time flatmate of T. S. Eliot.

By then Fleming had published his first novel, Casino Royale, which was reviewed in the TLS by Alan Ross. In contrast to the invective later heaped on James Bond by commentators such as Paul Johnson, Ross glowingly described the book as “exciting and extremely civilised”. But then Ross was another friend, in particular of Fleming’s wife Ann, whose literary salon was attended by Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh, who both contributed to the Queen Anne Press (though Waugh complained about “Ian Fleming’s idiot printing firm” making “a great balls-up of a little book of mine”, The Holy Places). In early 1954, around the time he was mulling over Kemsley’s offer and perhaps seeking to boost his literary credentials, Fleming wrote his only known review for the TLS, commending a book about race in Jamaica in concerned terms which today would be called “not politically correct”.

Like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, the well-read Fleming was soon trying to get off the James Bond treadmill. In early 1960, shortly after his round-the-world trip, he told his editor William Plomer that he intended killing off Bond in his next novel. Little over four years later, he himself was dead.

As a postscript, the Queen Anne Press has been bought by the Fleming family, which plans to relaunch the imprint this summer with a limited edition of Fleming’s works.

Andrew Lycett’s latest book, Conan Doyle: The man who created Sherlock Holmes was published last year. His biography of Ian Fleming appeared in 1996.

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