THE GOLDEN TYPEWRITER

On 16th August 1952, Ian Fleming writes to his wife, Ann, ‘My love, this is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words, since it is made of gold’. The gold-plated typewriter, a limited edition Royal Quiet Deluxe Portable, is a gift to himself while writing the Casino Royale manuscript, his first novel. Fleming has enjoyed long relationship with gold, collecting Spanish gold doubloons, writing with a gold-tipped ballpoint pen, naming his villa GoldenEye and including gold in several of his stories. The typewriter is a natural progression.

Some say it was inspired by a golden machine owned by Dojean Lane-Sayman, the American heiress and wife of one of Fleming’s old friends and secret service colleagues, Sir Peter Smithers. As Ian’s nephew Fergus tells it, ‘The golden typewriter was Ian’s great joke to himself. Just imagine his glee when it arrived in all its glittering splendour (smuggled in from America by his friend Ivar Bryce to avoid taxes). Serious-minded contemporaries considered it the height of vulgarity, but Ian didn’t care. Let them sneer! He had a golden typewriter, and they didn’t.’

Made by New York manufacturer, The Royal Typewriter Company, Fleming’s machine is a part of a small run of precious editions released in 1947 to generate PR. Given away as sports prizes or to favoured employees, the golden typewriters are based on the popular Quiet Deluxe Portable, first introduced in 1941. On 17th May, some weeks before submitting the revised Casino Royale manuscript to his publisher, Ian writes to his good friend Ivar Bryce asking him to bring the typewriter over on his next trip to England: ‘Here is one vital request. I am having constructed for me by the Royal Typewriter Company a golden typewriter which is to cost $174. I will not tell you why I am acquiring this machine.’ The gold-plated typewriter arrives and takes up residence on Ian’s desk at GoldenEye. He completes the revised Casino Royale manuscript on the gleaming compact machine, and later includes a gold typewriter in 1959’s Goldfinger story.

The typewriter goes on to be auctioned by Ian’s stepdaughter Hon. Mrs Fionn Morgan, at Christie’s, London on 5th May 1995, with a guide price of £5,000-£8,000. It is bought by an anonymous Irish bidder for £55,750 who sends representative Tony Quinn to snap up the machine, with strict orders to buy it at any cost. ‘They told me to keep bidding,’ said Quinn, a psychotherapist with connections to the entertainment business. ‘Just go in there and buy it. That was my brief.’

Now out of sight in a private collection, Ian Fleming’s gold Royal machine has its place in history and still holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s most expensive typewriter.