As I mentioned last week I’ve been asked to write an article on Hugh Walpole and PAN Books for the Hugh Walpole Society Journal. To that end I’ve started rescanning the covers and have just completed the ‘Rogue Herries’ quartet from 1971 with covers by John Raynes two of which are signed. This brought back memories of when Jules Burt and I visited John and his wife Sheila in Falmouth in 2012. We were made very welcome and plied with tea and cakes while looking at original artwork if I remember correctly. Sadly John passed away in 2019 aged 90.
I know this isn’t PAN but a couple of weeks ago on the BBC programme ‘The Antiques Roadshow’ there was a gentleman with 7 ‘Dr Who’ titles from Target. I have all the ‘Dr Who’ titles from 1 to somewhere around 147 so I was interested to see what price was given as to their worth. I know his were signed by Tom Baker and mine aren’t but a quick search produced a copy of ‘Dr Who and the Day of the Daleks’ signed by Tom Baker for £8.98 so I bought it. The valuation given for the 7 on the programme was £400!
And as if it was planned after mentioning both Jules Burt and ‘Dr Who’ in this blog, a recent video from Jules looks at the work of Sean Coleman who produces pastiche covers as postcards. This time they are mainly ‘Dr Who’ titles but done as Penguin covers. PAN gets a mention near the end of the video and I had already looked at these back in 2022 when Sean produced ‘Inside Number 9’ titles (A BBC TV Series) in the style of the ‘PAN Books of Horror’ Sean is also producing three ‘Dr Who’ pastiche Penguin covers as Christmas cards so get some now while stocks last.
