The Art of Bondage: The great book covers of Richard Chopping*

With Daniel Craig returning this fall as James Bond in “Skyfall” just a few weeks after the 50th anniversary of 007’s UK movie debut in “Dr. No,” and William Boyd agreeing to write a new Bond novel for publication 60 years after Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” appeared in 1953, let’s celebrate some of the finest book covers ever created--covers Fleming commissioned Richard Chopping to paint for Bond’s adventures.
Ian’s wife Ann came across Chopping’s work in 1956 while attending an exhibition of several painters, including her friend Francis Bacon, who urged her to take a look at Chopping’s flower paintings and trompe-l’oeil works. Impressed, she suggested to her husband that Chopping (1917-2008) might make the perfect artist for the covers of the Bond novels.
Fleming (1908-1964) liked what he saw, declaring Chopping “the only English master” in the art of trompe-l’oeil. Splitting the cost with his English publisher, Jonathan Cape, Fleming paid Chopping 50 guineas (about $147 in 1957), insisting that the cover of “From Russia, With Love,” show both a Smith & Wesson .38 with a modified trigger guard for faster firing and a rose with a drop of dew. Despite such specifics, Chopping always insisted that he and not Fleming ultimately designed the covers.
Eight more covers followed. Another artist worked on “Dr. No,” an unfortunate decision; Chopping, with his breadth of knowledge of flora and fauna, undoubtedly would have produced a memorable cover for a tale centered in the Caribbean, rather than the dark, dreary one Cape published in 1958.
But from “Goldfinger” on, Chopping’s distinctive covers—united by artistically rendered wooden backgrounds--dealt the Bond novels a consistent, distinctive look that Fleming appreciated for their beauty, sense of danger and commercial appeal. Chopping thought “Goldfinger,” with a cover showing a skull clutching a rose and gold coins filling its eye sockets, his finest work in the series.
The gifted Chopping could even make a toad with a captured dragonfly seem menacing as he did for “You Only Live Twice.” He writes amusingly to an editor at Cape about his adventures capturing a toad of “extraordinary malevolent appearance” to pose for the cover. The considerable correspondence among Fleming, Chopping and others concerning the covers sold at auction for $57,600 in 2010.
Writing to Chopping about ideas for the cover of “Thunderball,” Fleming said that the covers were “marvelous” and offered to increase Chopping’s fee, perhaps to 100 guineas. Chopping asked for 200, and Fleming agreed “on condition that you do my jackets every year,” according to Andrew Lycett’s excellent 1995 Fleming biography.
Fleming then suggested the look of “Thunderball’s” cover: “the skeleton of a man’s hand with the fingers resting on the Queen of Hearts. Through the back of the hand a dagger is plunged into the table top.” Chopping showed his independence by adding the Ace of Spades and changing the Queen of Hearts to the Queen of Diamonds. Of course, the Ace and Queen make blackjack, but that game is not played in the novel (there is a scene of Bond besting the villainous Emilio Largo at chemin de fer). Whatever the cards, “Thunderball” remains a great cover.
As is the cover for “For Your Eyes Only,” a collection of five Bond stories In the November 1998 edition of Firsts magazine, Lee Biondi and James M. Pickard wrote, “Fleming made Chopping paint it many times, until he was satisfied with the shape [of the eye] and the color.”
Chopping himself published a novel in 1965 called “The Fly” (not related to any movies with the same title). One editor at Secker & Warburg deemed the novel “a perfectly disgusting concoction” before passing it on to a younger editor named Giles Gordon who concluded the book was “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.” Utilizing his talents for depicting insects, Chopping painted a memorable cover of a fly—in close-up-that has landed on a human eye. No words appear. Flies also buzz about the covers of “The Man With The Golden Gun” and “Octopussy.”
When the Fleming estate decided to resurrect Bond in 1981 with a new series of novels, Chopping was commissioned to paint the cover for British thriller writer John Gardner’s “Licence Renewed.” Chopping’s cover of a Browning 9 mm automatic, with pearls, flowers and—yes—a fly evokes several Fleming covers, most notably “From Russia, With Love.” Artists paying homage to Chopping’s style painted the covers for the next four Gardner books.
Here’s a suggestion to the good editors at Jonathan Cape: commission an artist to paint the cover in the Chopping manner for William Boyd’s Bond novel due in 2013.
As for “From Russia, With Love,” a fine first UK edition with fine dust jacket can fetch as much as $11,000 these days. Perhaps Auric Goldfinger’s heirs can afford that, but the rest of us will have to play the lottery—or maybe master chemin de fer.
Bonne chance.
---------------------------------------------------------------
*This originally appeared in the New York Daily News book blog, Page Views.