A long time ago I made a page of the titles in the ‘Bestsellers of Literature’ series but the images were very small. I am currently rectify this by rescanning front and rear covers and is a work in progress. Most of the titles follow the same design of cover apart from ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Moll Flanders’ which are listed as in the series but were published before the cover style was launched in July 1967. The majority of the covers from 1967 onwards are by John Raynes, with four by Pat Owen, and I got John to sign a few copies for me but unfortunately I put them away before the ink was properly dry! Interestingly ‘Moll Flanders’ was misnumber in the third printing as X438 and not X433. X438 is ‘A Prince for Inspector West’
I always like to pick up proof copies of PAN titles and this time it was for ‘The Battle of Britain’ by Leonard Mosley published in 1969 as ‘The making of the film’ to coincide with the release of the film of the same year.
I spotted what I would call ‘a couple of oddities’ on eBay. The first was for a hardback reworking of the 1955 edition of ‘Casino Royale’. It looks like it was done from scratch and not just a paperback edition converted. It sold for £73 while the other is still on sale at £134 and is for two bespoke cases for ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘Moonraker’. As the seller hastens to add ‘the books are NOT included’