PAN Fans Club

Let's talk about PAN paperbacks, the blog for those that do judge a book by its cover. Main site is at www.tikit.net or www.panfans.club

PAN Fans Club - Let's talk about PAN paperbacks, the blog for those that do judge a book by its cover. Main site is at  www.tikit.net or www.panfans.club

AUSTRALIAN SPECIAL Terry Lane, Ian Moffitt and Ben Ostrick

Sorting through newer titles I find I have several that are by Australian authors and printed by PAN in Australian.

One of them ‘Gilt Edge’ by journalist Ian Moffitt (1926-2000) is odd in that the word PAN is redacted on the cover while it says Hinkler Books on the spine. I’ve emailed Hinkler to ask if they bought up surplus stock and put their name on it, no response so far. I did find this copy which still shows the word PAN but it’s the only one so far.
The second author is radio broadcaster Terry Lane (1939) and I’ve scanned in the three titles published by PAN although two fail my ‘PAN Man’ logo test but for completeness they are included.

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The Australian connection to Ben Ostrick (above with wife Marie and baby Lisa Dawn) or J. Oval as he is probably better know from all of the covers he did using that name for PAN is that I eventually tracked down where and when he died.It was on the 13th December 1966 and his memorial can be found near Sidney at Position 27, Wall K, North Walls, Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park, Matraville, Randwick City, New South Wales, Australia.Thanks to member’s of Ben’s family for clues of where to look. If any fellow PAN Fans are around there I’d love a photo of the memorial.

Rebound Editions, Ross Thomas and Farmer Joe.

If you are reading this then it means it has successfully published itself as schedule as we are making our way back over the North Sea from Amsterdam to Newcastle Upon Tyne. I’ll report next week if I have managed to acquire anything of PAN related interest.

Last week I picked up assorted bits and pieces including some very nicely rebound editions of Jean Plaidy titles and unusually for this type of mutilated paperback they have left on the front and back covers.

The featured author of the week, which I’ve just decided will be a new  occasional offering, this time is Ross Thomas who has had six titles published by PAN. He was born on February 19, 1926 in Oklahoma City and died two months before his 70th birthday in 1995. Another edition of ‘If You Can’t be Good’ (as above) should be in the post and I will add a good scan as soon as it arrives.Thomas also wrote as Oliver Bleeck but I don’t think PAN published any of those.

Quite a while ago I made a page showing three of the four “Out and About” series titles but didn’t include the last one as sellers were asking silly prices.I have now completed the set and got the last one at a lot more acceptable price namely 99p.

Colin Dexter Pan Crime, More Plastic Covers, RIP Albert Finney and George’s Covers?

I’ve added a few more covers to the Colin Dexter page and although they don’t have the ‘PAN Man’ on them they do have the PAN Crime dagger that was used for a couple of years along with several others designs for the different genres. One is odd in that there are two variants of the style that was previously used on just one title, the red dagger and the yellow rectangle. I’ve left some areas with just a message in then hope that these editions do exist but I don’t know for sure at the moment.

After putting on a PAN title with a Plastic Cover last week I have since found four more. As a site that does judge a book by its cover I’ll leave you to form your own opinions!

We lost another actor from my formative years last Thursday, namely Albert Finney. I can remember sneaking in to see ‘Tom Jones’, cert 18, when I was 13 but I was tall for my age! Alan Sillitoe received a Golden PAN award for ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

I’ve also heard back from George Sharp regarding the cover for ‘Count Vronsky’s Daughter which, even with his name on the back, he says is not his! This is the second cover George says is not his even with his name on the back, the other being the 1980 edition of  ‘The White Rajah’

John Burke, Golden PAN Awards and a Plastic Cover

John Burke, who wrote over thirty titles for PAN under different names, also appeared on the BBC TV programme ‘Mastermind’ He got through to the semi-finals as did his wife Jean who was also on ‘Brain of Britain’ Thanks to the BBC Genome Project you can find the listings which the BBC printed in Radio Times between 1923 and 2009.
HERE are the listing relating to John and Jean plus of one of his plays.

After putting on details for Adam Kay and his well deserved ‘Golden PAN Awards’ I’ve been updating the page for these awards. The the link can always be found at the top of this page.

A while ago I put on three PAN titles which were slightly larger than a paperback and which had plastic covers. I’ve now added a fourth, ‘The Personal Computer Handbook’ but for the the life of me I can’t work out why you might need a wipe clean book about computing!

Back in the day when I was a real teacher we were the first authority in the UK  to have a computer in every classroom including the nursery schools. I’m not saying there is a connection but a certain computing giant (this was back in 1980) did have it’s UK headquarters about half a mile away from our Education Department. The company is listed in in the above mentioned book.