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?
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.
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.
