Grant Thiessen, Canadian bookdealer, is currently going through my website and letting me know of anything to correct which is mainly incorrect ISBNs as I used a lot of ‘cut and paste’ making the pages. In one of his emails he pointed out that I didn’t appear to have a ‘Danube Edition’ of ‘The Act of Creation’ by Arthur Koestler. I must admit I hadn’t noticed so the error has now been rectified. I’ve also added Koestler’s later title ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ to the page as it was in the same format. PAN published several Koestler titles as Picador which I’ll add later but also two as PANs, ‘The Call-Girls’ and ‘The Case of the Midwife Toad’ with the latter later published as a Picador.
Random title of the week is for ‘The Boston Strangler’ by Gerold Frank. PAN published three editions that I know of with the first edition being the elusive E13. It took me a while to get a copy but luckily a PAN Fan sent me one. It surprises me how often the second edition with the film tie-in cover but with a SBN and E on the spine is passed off as the first. This is the same as ‘The Life of Ian Fleming’ with a listed first rarely having the magic E12 on the cover and spine.
Amongst the David Tayler covers were a couple of black and white photos of book covers. It was only when Rog Peyton pointed out they didn’t actually exist as such I had a better look. ‘Cimarron’ was a book by Edna Ferber not James Walter Bellah who didn’t exist but there was a James Warner Bellah who wrote westerns. ‘Stage to Sweetwater’ seemed to just appear as a short story from 1955 in ‘Ranch Romances’ As the covers were in b/w I though I’d put them through KOLARIZE and I’m pretty impressed with the results, a really easy to use program if you skip the tweaking bits but you do have to pay about 50p an image if you don’t want ‘Ks’ all over it. Rog also suggested a possible title for the mystery cover which is on the same page. although not by Tayler but by another PAN stalwart, Roger Hall.