As I mentioned last week I recently pick up a box of David Tayler related material when I visited Maurice Flanagan at Zardoz Books in Westbury. There are literally dozens of printers proofs of his covers plus several roughs both painted and drawn in pencil. I’ll be featuring them in the coming weeks as blog items. The first one is for PAN 434 ‘The Gun Tamer’ by Max Brand where the rough is the mirror image of the final artwork. I have also included a link on the front page of my website to a pencil rough by Tayler for ‘Lieutenant Hornblower’ until some ‘new’ news comes up.
The CD ‘Come Spy With Us’ has a PAN pastiche, or is that homage, cover. Why they had to put fake crease lines on it I don’t know as, annoyingly, we get enough of those anyway. It has 25 themes to ‘spy’ related film and television series. In the accompanying booklet they feature a few PAN books covers along side a bit of blurb.
While in Warwick I picked up a copy of ‘Down Among the Donkeys’ by Elisabeth Svendsen as it looked vaguely familiar but was published by Whittet Books, a publisher I hadn’t come across before. On getting home I found why it rang a bell as it was a title previously published by PAN with the same cover but with the PAN logo covered over. I have a few examples of this sort of thing including Totem titles from Canada and Hinkler in Australia. PAN also published ‘The Great Escape’ by Elisabeth Svendsen as a Piccolo. Both titles are illustrated by Eve Bygrave.