PAN didn’t publish many of Catherine Cookson’s novels, apart from three for children under their Piccolo imprint, but Corgi did and when I saw a piece of original artwork by Dave Pether for ‘Tilly Trotter Wed’ at a reasonable price I couldn’t resists. This artwork was used first on the series where Cookson’s name appeared as above but also reissued on a later edition. I’ve put together a few other examples on a page HERE. (Thanks to Boscobel Old Hall’s secondhand bookshop for most of them) Dave Pether was born in Southall in 1943 and lived and worked there for all his life. He went to Twickenham Tech Art College and contributed to the well known OZ magazine and was also a musician. His band ‘The Muleskinners’ were part of the early 1960’s art school R&B scene. A Motorbike accident cut short his musical career but after college he worked in an animation studio and then joined the Young Artists Agency and John Spencer before setting up his own illustration company ‘Dave Pether Illustration’ in the 1970s. In the 1990’s Dave started teaching art at Brunel University and taught there for 12 years. During this time he moved into doing video game illustration including working on the very popular ‘Lemmings’
Back on April 20th BBC Radio Four did a dramatisation of ‘Casino Royale’ and I was going to listen to it but it appears not to be available anymore. It looks like it was a very condensed version running for just under sixty minutes. What reminded me was Jeremy Birch send me a pile of clippings from ‘The Times’ which mentioned it and the article was illustrated with a copy of PAN X232.
Having posted a couple of Canadian editions of PAN titles recently, HERE are two more from Douglas Adams. They are almost the same as the UK printings apart from saying ‘Printed in Canada’ and having the ISBN printed on the front covers as well as the back. There are often other differences such as the paper type or card cover thickness but not this time and not even any green stained edges!