The James Bond Bedside Companion by Raymond Benson Page B

like Nazim Kalkavan in Istanbul, Sir William Stephenson in Bermuda, and Richard Hughes in the Far East. The Life of Ian Fleming was published by Jonathan Cape a year later. Russell and Pearson had originally planned to share the credit on the book, but since Pearson had done all the work, Russell agreed to let him have full credit.

Board games. (Reprinted by permission of Milton Bradley Co.)

Colgate-Palmolive produced a line of 007 toiletries. (Reprinted by permission of Colgate-Palmolive Co.)

Vanity Fair's Clock Radio. (Reprinted by permission of ERTL, a subsidiary of Kidde, Inc.)

T-shirts and "diplomas" on sale at a New York James Bond Collectors Convention.

In April, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN was published posthumously. The jacket illustration was again by Richard Chopping, this time a wrap-around showing a gold-plated Colt .45 revolver, flies and gold bullets. Unfortunately, since Fleming had been unable to do his usual rewriting and revising, the novel was a weak entry in the Bond canon. Kingsley Amis, in the New Statesman ,called it "a sadly empty tale, empty of the interests and effects that for better or worse, Ian Fleming made his own." When it was published in August in America, it was received somewhat more enthusiastically. But despite mixed reviews, the book remained a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time.
    Almost overshadowing THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN was a book by O. F. Snelling called 007 James Bond: A Report , the first of the books about Fleming's novels. Published late in 1964, it was a best seller. In May, 1965, Jonathan Cape published the "official" study of the Bond oeuvre : The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis. Amis had originally intended to write a simple article on the works, but as he states in his foreword, the article grew to formidable book length. Written with warmth and humor, Amis' book is more a series of essays on different facets of the novels than a scholarly study. Also appearing in 1965 was The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007, published by Jonathan Cape in England and Viking Press in the United States. Kingsley Amis wrote this book as well, using the pseudonym "Lt. Col. William 'Bill' Tanner" (M's Chief of Staff in the novels).The Book of Bond was an amusing trivia collection with information on James Bond's tastes in clothes, food, drink, etc.
    A double bill re-release of Dr. No and From Russia With Love the summer of 1965 made more money than the films' first releases, and Thunderball ,released at the end of the year, was the biggest grossing Bond film to that date. The production received the most publicity and news coverage of any of the Bond films, as over 10,000 reporters and photographers flooded the Bahamas to get a glimpse of the proceedings. Many magazines, such as Life , Saturday Evening Post, and Look featured cover stories on the film. An hour-long TV special called "The Incredible World of James Bond" was shown in the fall of 1965, featuring behind-the-scenes looks at Thunderball ,plus clips from the previous three films. Thunderball had one of the biggest openings in cinematic history.
    The January 7, 1966 issue of Life magazine featured Sean Connery on the cover. But to millions of kids and adults alike, it was "James Bond." This was becoming a problem for the actor who played him. Sean Connery was rapidly losing his identity as an actor capable of other types of roles. It infuriated him when the press only wanted to ask him questions about James Bond, when he'd much rather have talked about the experiences he had making The Hill , a fine film re leased in 1965 and directed by his Mend Sidney Lumet But what really irritated the actor was that production of the Bond pictures almost always went over the allotted time period, a time Connery felt he could be putting to better use. In a recent interview he related that it took six weeks to film The Hill, while You Only Live Twice took six months,the time it would take to make four small