The Man with the Golden Typewriter by Bloomsbury Publishing Page A

recommended, with which I agree, and I have simply not had time to get down to it and it doesn’t in fact affect the book in any way.
    I am not entirely happy with the title but nothing we have been able to think up is an improvement.
    If any other readers have ideas I shall be most grateful to hear them.
    TO J. B. REED, ESQ., The Bowater Paper Corporation Ltd., Bowater House, Stratton Street, W.1.
    One of the dramatic set pieces in
Moonraker
involved a car chase in which Bond’s vehicle was thrown off the road when Drax’s henchman, Krebs, unleashed a roll of newsprint from the lorry ahead. For advice, Fleming sought out Bowater, the world’s biggest supplier of newsprint and an organisation of near Blofeldian stature, which not only operated paper mills but, to safeguard against strikes, owned its own forests and ran its own dedicated shipping line.
    30th June, 1954
    Dear Sir,
    I wonder if you would be kind enough to give me a little help in my capacity as a spare-time writer of thrillers.
    In my next book a Bowater’s newsprint carrier features briefly and dramatically, and I wonder if you would tell me if the following sentences are correct:
    1) “One of Bowater’s huge Foden Diesel carriers was just grinding into the first bend of the hairpin labouring under five tons of newsprint it was taking on a night run to one of the Ramsgate newspapers.”
    (Apart from correcting the facts, have you actually got a customer in Ramsgate or elsewhere on the Isle of Thanet?)
    2) “His head lamps showed the long carrier with the eight gigantic rolls, each containing half a mile of newsprint.”
    If you would be kind enough to scribble in corrections or suggestions on this letter and return it to me, I would be most grateful.
    Yours Faithfully,
    He was advised that although Bowater had a client on the Isle of Thanet, they did not deliver at night. Their lorries were eight-wheeled AECs which typically carried twenty-one rolls, each containing five miles of newsprint. It was the very kind of detail that Fleming relished.
    TO WREN HOWARD
    9th July, 1954
    Very many thanks for your letter of yesterday and I am delighted you are pleased with the book.
    Your points of detail are all excellent and most valuable and they will all have attention. Any other similar comments, however harsh, will be very welcome.
    Curiously enough the book was always called THE MOONRAKER until a week after I finalised it when Noël Coward reminded me that Tennyson Jesse 8 once used the same title.
    Do you think it would matter using it again or that we ought to get clearance from somebody?
    Alternatively perhaps we could call it “THE MOONRAKER SECRET” or “THE MOONRAKER PLOT” or at any rate tack on one other word.
    I have the master typescript and I will tidy it up and give it to Michael at the end of the month so that it can go early to the printers.
    My Autumn looks as if it’s going to be rather busy and I would very much like to get the proofs corrected and off my chest as soon as possible.
    I will also rough out a jacket for Michael to consider.
    I will attack the contract next week.
    TO WREN HOWARD
    The search for a title continued . . .
    15th July, 1954
    What do you think of THE INFERNAL MACHINE as a title?
    Or alternatively WIDE OF THE MARK or THE INHUMAN ELEMENT?
    Personally, I think the first might be the one. It is an expression everyone knows but has long been out of fashion.
    Despite Fleming’s enthusiasm for
The Infernal Machine,
none of his suggestions found favour. At the bottom of the letter Howard scribbled a list of alternatives:
Bond and the Moonraker, The Moonraker Scare
and
The Moonraker Plot
. All were later crossed out, leaving at the end just a single word. He circled it firmly:
Moonraker.
    TO MICHAEL HOWARD
    Fleming took particular pride in designing dust jackets for his novels.
Casino Royale
and
Live and Let Die
had both been his and now with
Moonraker
he made a third