Release and Reception
On Her Majesty's Secret Service was published on 1 April 1963 in the UK as a hardcover edition by publishers Jonathan Cape; it was 288 pages long and cost 16 shillings. A limited edition of 250 copies were also printed that were numbered and signed by Fleming. Artist Richard Chopping once again undertook the cover art for the first edition. There were 42,000 advance orders for the hardback first edition and Cape did an immediate second impression of 15,000 copies, selling over 60,000 by the end of April 1963. By the end of 1963 it had sold in excess of 75,000 copies.
The novel was published in America in August by the New American Library, after Fleming changed publishers from Viking Press after The Spy Who Loved Me. The book was 299 pages long and cost $4.50 and it topped The New York Times Best Seller list for over six months.
Read more about this topic: On Her Majesty's Secret Service (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words release and/or reception:
“An inquiry about the attitude towards the release of so-called political prisoners. I should be very sorry to see the United States holding anyone in confinement on account of any opinion that that person might hold. It is a fundamental tenet of our institutions that people have a right to believe what they want to believe and hold such opinions as they want to hold without having to answer to anyone for their private opinion.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)