All’s I Want for Christmas Is Some Pussy Galore
Who wouldn’t love to find a passel of Bond girls under the tree? Galore, indeed … not to mention Honey Rider and Plenty O’Toole, plus all of the other deliciously lascivious luv puppies of everyone’s fave gentleman spy. For the 40th anniversary of the James Bond franchise, one may acquiesce to a veritable Bond-age smorgasbord of double-Oh marketing to get one’s Santa on. Surely, the explosion of DVD sets, soundtracks, and behind-the-scenes books, etc., has caught a few goldeneyes? One item, however, Blofelds the rest away. Like the films themselves, Tony Nourmand‘s James Bond Movie Posters: The Official 007 Collection (Chronicle Books, $29.95 paper) offers much in the way of leggy villanesses and naughty, naughty sidekicks, and enough martinis, models, and megalomaniacs to sate the most cadlike of raffish rakes. Loaded from the Eon Productions archives (the company behind the spy), the volume is packed with rarely seen vintage and foreign teasers, poster images, and one-sheets documenting four decades of Bond blockbusters: from the positively slutty, Peter Maxian look of some unused art for Live and Let Die to the stoic, Soviet-flavored placard for The Spy Who Loved Me, heralding the first screening of a Bond film behind the Iron Curtain in 1989. Nourmand thoughtfully includes profiles of the wild array of artists involved, as well as key production and design facts to provide context and create a narrative of sorts. The book has been released in gorgeous 10-by-14-inch coffeetable paperback moderately priced at $29.95. It would not be unthinkable to go to Kinko’s, slice off the spine, and use the contents for their original intended purposes. And for the archivist types out there who might wonder what type of paper stock was used in the making of this book: Why, Bond, 130gsm matte Bond, of course.
This article appears in December 13 • 2002.