I recently heard, via Rog Peyton, from Marion Ellis who was a friend of David Tayler. Her husband took photographs of David posing as references for his book covers for which David got paid £40. She sent me five which I have put on the page HERE which is my guess as to which cover they went with. Do you agree?

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Sir Thomas Hicks (17/12/936), known professionally as Tommy Steele, is an English entertainer, regarded as Britain’s first teen idol rock and roll star, actor, sculptor and writer. He wrote a children’s novel, ‘Quincy’ about a reject toy trying to save himself and his fellow rejects in a bin in the basement of a toy store. published in 1981. When I read this I was reminded of something similar, ‘The Raggy Dolls’, a British cartoon series which aired on TV in 1986. The series is set in Mr Grimes’ Toy Factory, where imperfect dolls are thrown into a reject bin. Any similarity I’m sure is purely coincidental! ‘The Raggy Dolls’ books were published by Boxtree, another PAN imprint.

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It’s been a while since I communicated with Johnny Mains when he was talking about producing the ‘The PAN Book of Horror Stories Scrapbook’ which, unfortunately, didn’t materialise. I have the Les Edwards artwork that was going to be the cover and I know I have shown it before but it is worth a second look.. The reason Johnny got in touch was it was his 50th birthday and he got a personalised card from artist Richard Wells which makes me a little jealous. Click HERE to see it.

This week the David Tayler rough is for ‘Oh Promised Land’ by James Street. Street (15/10/1903 to 298/08/1954) was an American journalist, minister, and writer. He wrote at least 16 novels of which PAN published just the one. Apparently he was giving out awards, laid his head on the table and was dead from a heart attack at the age of 50!

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As the above had a film linked to its title this advert seems appropriate to include here.

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It was quite a while ago that I made a page to show the ‘Morph‘ titles from Piccolo. I thought I had all the three but it turns out there was a fourth. This is ‘The Big Match’ and now added to the page.

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We spent the Easter weekend over indulging in food and chocolate in Newcastle Upon Tyne. I was hoping to visit some bookshops if they were open but didn’t manage it although my cousin very kindly came along and took us to Seaton Delaval Hall. We also visited the Beamish Museum which would have been really good if we didn’t have the Black Country Living Museum and Blist Hill Museum on our doorsteps, places we visit often. It got marked down because the sweet shop didn’t have coltsfoot rock while both of our two local museums do.

As I mentioned last week I had not noticed the passing of artist Paul Sample (19/02/1947 to 27/01/2026) back in January. We often emailed, with me usually asking for more information on a specific cover. He is probably most well known to PAN Fans for painting the Tom Sharpe covers but he also did others for PAN. We also lost Len Deighton (18/02/1929 to 15/03/2026) more recently and PAN published a couple of his books such as ‘Bomber’ plus including endorsements on several other titles.

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Not PAN but looking through assorted bits and pieces I came across these A4 adverts for ‘The Ninja’. It’s a pity there aren’t seven then we would have had all the colours of the rainbow. They come in a folder made of what seems like bright red flock wallpaper which may have a significance that eludes me.

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This weeks David Tayler rough is for what seems to be a rather elusive PAN title, namely ‘Blackwater’ by Frank O’Rourke. PAN published another book with the same title but by H L Tredree which seems to be much more common. More on this title in a couple of weeks.

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FOOTNOTE As was pointed out on a James Bond Facebook page there are some very optimistic sellers out there. Now how many copies of this book have I got?

This weeks rough from David Tayler is for 424 ‘Glory Hole’ by William MacLeod Raine. The last time I featured this cover my site was number 1 in Germany for those of a certain persuasion. I’m sure they were very disappointed to find it wasn’t quite what they were after but I hope I educated them to the fact there were more interesting things that knot holes in toilet walls.

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Watching one of Jules Burt’s very informative videos recently I was interested to see a copy of ‘SF News’ I’d not come across before. It mentions two titles by Richard Cowper on the front page and I’m pleased to say I have the original artwork for ‘Twilight of Briareus‘ by Geoff Tayler. ‘Galactic Warlord‘ is featured on the back page with artwork for this, and other titles in this series, by Terry Oakes.

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If you have a spare £5,000+ and are looking for something to buy then how about a PAN 1976 copy of ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ signed by  eight members of the cast of the 1976 film namely Donald Sutherland (Liam Devlin), Michael Caine (Kurst Steiner), Jenny Agutter (Molly), Larry Hagman (Colonel Pitts), Sven-Bertil Taube (Captain von Neustadt), Judy Geeson (Pamela), Jean Marsh (Joanna Grey) and Siegfried Rauch (Sergeant Brandt). 

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Although it was back at the start of the year I’ve only just heard of the passing of artist Paul Sample on the 27th January. As I’m currently in Newcastle Upon Tyne I’ll have more on Paul next week.