As I mentioned last week I’ve been asked to write an article on Hugh Walpole and PAN Books for the Hugh Walpole Society Journal. To that end I’ve started rescanning the covers and have just completed the ‘Rogue Herries’ quartet from 1971 with covers by John Raynes two of which are signed. This brought back memories of when Jules Burt and I visited John and his wife Sheila in Falmouth in 2012. We were made very welcome and plied with tea and cakes while looking at original artwork if I remember correctly. Sadly John passed away in 2019 aged 90.

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I know this isn’t PAN but a couple of weeks ago on the BBC programme ‘The Antiques Roadshow’ there was a gentleman with 7 ‘Dr Who’ titles from Target. I have all the ‘Dr Who’ titles from 1 to somewhere around 147 so I was interested to see what price was given as to their worth. I know his were signed by Tom Baker and mine aren’t but a quick search produced a copy of ‘Dr Who and the Day of the Daleks’ signed by Tom Baker for £8.98 so I bought it. The valuation given for the 7 on the programme was £400!

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And as if it was planned after mentioning both Jules Burt and ‘Dr Who’ in this blog, a recent video from Jules looks at the work of Sean Coleman who produces pastiche covers as postcards. This time they are mainly ‘Dr Who’ titles but done as Penguin covers. PAN gets a mention near the end of the video and I had already looked at these back in 2022 when Sean produced ‘Inside Number 9’ titles (A BBC TV Series) in the style of the ‘PAN Books of Horror’  Sean is also producing three ‘Dr Who’ pastiche Penguin covers as Christmas cards so get some now while stocks last.

This week I’m looking at the titles from Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Casey and Eileen O’Casey published by PAN in the 1970’s. The majority of them have a photographic cover of which I am not that keen but as there was so many of them I have decided I will share them.

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Frank O’Connor (Michael Francis O’Donovan) was born in 1903 in Cork, County Cork, Ireland and died on March 10, 1966 in Dublin. He was an Irish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer who, as a critic and as a translator of Gaelic works from the 9th to the 20th century, served as an interpreter of Irish life and literature to the English-speaking world. Raised in poverty, a childhood he recounted in An Only Child, O’Connor received little formal education before going to work as a librarian in Cork and later in Dublin. 

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Sean O’Casey (John Casey) was born 30th March 1880 in Dublin and died 18 September 1964 in Torquay. He was an Irish dramatist and was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.  O’Casey’s first accepted play, ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. While in London to supervise the West End production of ‘Juno and the Paycock’ O’Casey fell in love with Eileen Carey (stage name). The couple were married in 1927 and remained in London until 1938 when they moved to Totnes.

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Eileen O’Casey (Eileen Kathleen Reynolds) born in Dublin on the 27th December 1900, She attended the Brentwood Ursuline Convent High School and having read ‘Juno and the Paycock’ she developed an obsessive need to meet the author. She met O’Casey when 17 years his junior, and he immediately invited her to take the role of Nora Clitheroe in ‘The Plough and the Stars’ for its first London production. The O’Caseys married on the 23rd September 1927 in the Catholic church of ‘All Souls and the Redeemer’ in Chelsea. She died in London on the 9th April 1995.