11 Things You Probably Didn't Know about James Bond

The list, care of io9.

From said list...

10. Ian Fleming had literary aspirations for the Bond novels

He referred to his books not as literature, but as "thrillers designed to be read as literature." In a 1957 letter to CBS, Fleming explained: "In hard covers, my books are written for and appeal primarily to an "A" readership but they have all been reprinted in paperbacks in both England and America and it appears that the "B" and "C" classes find them equally readable, although one might have thought that the sophistication of the background and detail would be outside their experience and in part incomprehensible." Much later, Fleming was vindicated, when the critic Umberto Eco embarked on a rigorous study of the Bond books using the then-trendy field of Structural Analysis.