Sad to say we’ve lost yet another artist last Thursday. It was Bob Layzell, who painted covers for many publishers including PAN. Bob was born in Brighton, Sussex (04/05/1940 to 29/01/2026). I’ve picked a few of his covers of the shelf including ‘Farthest Star’, ‘Approaching Oblivion’ and ‘100 Years of Science Fiction’ books 1 and 2. I had emailed Bob a while back to check the covers I had were his and he kindly replied to confirm they were and to say ‘The Farthest Star cover was the first I had published in 1976′
I got the news about the passing of Roger and Cecil as mentioned last week from Brian Sanders when I emailed him about a cover he painted. The book was ‘Fear’ by John Ives and Brian emailed back to say; “I certainly do remember and can add a little info as the figure on the cover of FEAR is me. Lizzie took the reference picture for me. I can still remember some of the book’s content as after the Suez invasion I was transferred into 45’s Intelligence section and went to Libya for desert training. In ‘Fear’ there is a perfect description of how to produce water in desert conditions which rang bells for me as it was something we’d been taught. At the time I thought the book would have made a good film – do read it.”
Random writer this week is Dan Greenburg (20/06/1936 to 18/12/2023) an American writer, humorist, and journalist. He wrote 73 novels published in 20 languages in 24 countries of which PAN published four which you can see HERE. ‘I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband’ is a 1973 American sex comedy film directed by Robert McCarty based on Greenburg’s novel ‘Chewsday’