A couple of nights ago I got a call that came up as ‘Doctor’ on the house phone. Straight away my thought was what do they want to test me for now? It was the receptionist who said ‘We’ve just had a call from Dr Nambisan who’s on holiday in India, what was the title of that book you wanted?’ Now that’s what I call patient doctor care as I mentioned this to her once when we were chatting about my books which seems like years ago. She said then that PAN books were very common in India and if she was there she would look out for X705 ‘Junior Crosswords Book 3’ by Robin Burgess but it sounds like she mislaid the title she wrote on a prescription pad at the time. This is the one numbered title I still need for the collection.

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A few years back I set out to make a page of all the Piccolo Explorers titles which was when I was scanning covers in at a lower resolution than now. I have just acquired a bit of ephemera namely an Explorers bookmark which I’ve put on my web page. It was while looking at it I realised I had not included the six titles in the Bible Stories series which I had found in Malta. These are now added and as usual please let me know of any titles I have have missed.

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I don’t know why but I like boxed sets or those in a slip case and PAN editions of James Herriot are amongst my favorites. I have a Canadian printing slip case set of 4 titles, another Canadian printing boxed set of 6 still wrapped in plastic and the same set that has been opened . I have just added a slip case set of 3 UK printings and I’ve put them at the bottom of my Herriot page which can be seen HERE

“Kit Thackeray was born in Deal, Kent and worked for Southern Television before joining George Adamson and lions in Kenya. He has filmed all over Africa , has been up the Nile, driven across Brazil and most of Australasian and now lives abroad” That was taken from the blurb inside the two books of his PAN published which you can see HERE They are examples of a cover I like and one I’m not that bothered about, can you guess which one is which? I do like part of the endorsement in ‘Crownbird’ which says ‘It would make a good in-flight read if there was absolutely nothing else available’

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With so many covers being photographs from the 1970s onwards, as in the above, although not my thing I still look out for historical fiction as, along with S/F, they still tend to have painted covers. Having picked up a bundle of Jean Stubbs novels it was good to see at least two of the three cover artists were familiar names, namely Gary Keane and Colin Backhouse. Jean Stubbs (23/10/1926 to 19/10/2012) was born Jean Yvonne Higham in Denton, Lancashire and went to Manchester High School for Girls, the Manchester School of Art and Loreburn Secretarial College in Manchester. She worked as a copywriter from 1964 to 1966 and was a reviewer for Books and Bookmen from 1965 to 1976. She died in the Helston, Cornwall

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Mentioning Colin Backhouse reminds me of the two Futura books by Flora Pearce for which he painted the covers. The reason I was interested in these is that they are set locally to me and often mention the railway that ran through the village. This is now disused and has become a Greenway called the McClean Way named after the Victorian engineer who built it in 1849. I am one of the old fogies that look after it and can be found down there most Mondays and is much better since it got an upgraded surface last Easter. Just trying to remember which local celebrity they got to cut the ribbon at the opening? Ah Yes, it was me!

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If any one finds themselves at a loose end in Wolverhampton then the Pop Up Bookshop is back in the Community Hub in the Mander Centre until 21st March. Opening hours are Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm, Saturday 9.30am to 5pm, Sunday 11am to 4pm. Radio 4 legend Robin Ince was in the shop last week. He is the co-creator of top Radio 4 show “The Infinite Monkey Cage ” along with Brian Cox.

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′ 

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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.”

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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’