As I mentioned last week I was really pleased to be contacted by Gavin Scott who has a very long list of accomplishments to his name. The best one I found was on Gavin’s page on Amazon.com (it’s not on the UK site) Gavin sent me an article about how PAN ties in with his latest book and you can find it HERE. I’m hoping for more in the future. Here are a few covers for a story by Gavin for a favourite film.

I recently bought a 1950’s FLIER for gardening books off eBay but was a little disappointed in that it only featured one title that I could possibly tie into PAN from the year 1950 but it does mean I can mention the delightful but sadly missed artist Val Biro again.

Finally goodbye to magician Paul Daniels who died on the 17th of March and who had two of his books of magic published by Piccolo in 1980 and 1981.

Over the last few weeks I’ve undertaken an activity which up to now has been alien to me, namely getting rid of books. My wife has decided I now have to have a ‘one in, one out’ regime so I’ve been passing on some titles I’m quite happy never to see again. It was while sorting some tatty duplicates to give to a great National Trust bookshop at Baddesley Clinton I started looking at dates and prices. I now present my equivalent of the Big Mac Index but for Nevil Shute titles from the mid 70’s.

It was comparing the prices on a couple of copies of ‘No Highway’ as below I noticed the huge variation over just a couple of years, was there rampant inflation then?

It’s interesting to see on the 13th edition there is just the faint remnants of pricing that must have been for the 12th edition as it says the Australian price was $1.20. All apart from ‘The Chequer Board’ are listed not for sale in Canada. The 1974 edition of this title is priced $1.25 and a year later had gone up to $1.95

The 11th edition from 1974 and the 13th edition from 1976

I mentioned in the last blog  the book ‘The Unborn’ and that it was inscribed to what I thought said Peter Parr but it turns out it was to Peter Pann, the nickname of Peter Tietjen who has appeared in previous blogs and  who worked at PAN in the 70’s. It was a complete fluke I found the connection but Peter says he auctioned off a lot of his signed copies only recently.

I was really ‘chuffed’ to be contacted by Gavin Scott (and not me doing the badgering as usual) He very kindly said “I’m a great fan of your site, which I think is superbly organised and very rich” Thanks Gavin and I’ll have more from Gavin in the next blog.

PS I don’t think my wife noticed I came back from Baddesley Clinton with three books under my coat. One is for a ‘Jalna’ page I’m putting together but as usual books are arriving very slowly from the States but should all be here in a couple of weeks.

I recently mentioned a newspaper article in which it was claimed Aubrey Forshaw came up with the name PAN from ‘Dent’s Junior Everyman’ I have searched high and low and have not found a book with this name. The nearest match I can find is ‘The Age of Fable’ in the Everyman library which was written for “young readers” My copy is the 1927 edition and on page 171 has an entry about PAN.

I’m pleased to say I was successful in connecting up Penguin with Neville Dear but was disappointed to find Penguin had no idea of which books the illustrations came from as they were only signed by Neville. I asked if I could have a photo before they were sent off but I was too late.

I’ve made a new page to show the various editions of ‘Red, White and Rose’ by Edmund Penning-Rowsell after I mentioned the possibility of another copy which was listed by a seller as hardback with a pictorial cover. On closer examination of their apparent ‘Booksellers Image’ I realised it was my copy of T27 as it has quite a few blemished which I managed to match crease for crease! This just proves you can’t always trust the photo even when it appears to be the genuine article.

I picked up ‘The Unborn’ as an advanced reading copy by American obstetrician David Shobin which doesn’t seem to live up to the description as appears to never been opened apart from when it was signed on the first page.
Inside this book and the final published edition it states it is from 1981 but that clearly doesn’t agree with the cover which says 15th January 1982.My copy is inscribed to a Peter Parr(?)  but a search doesn’t help too much although I did find another doctor in the States with that name.
I’ve added couple of other covers off the net while I try to work out if I actually like the PAN version?

Up to now I’ve not really mention much about PAN’s imprint Picador which  came into being in 1971, the same time as Piccolo. Ralph Vernon-Hunt, Clarence Paget, Simon Master and Caroline Lassalle (the firm’s chief in-house reader) tried to find a name and eventually Caroline came up with the name Picador (Paget wanted Primrose!) and she became its first editor of what was intended to be a showcase for international writers

On the 6 October 1972 Picador launched with eight paperbacks: ‘Rosshalde’ by Hermann Hesse, ‘A Personal Anthology’ by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Trout Fishing in America’ by Richard Brautigan, ‘The Naked I’ edited by Frederick R. Karl and Leo Hamalian, ‘The Bodyguard’ by Adrian Mitchell, ‘Heroes and Villains’ by Angela Carter, ‘Les Guérillères’ by Monique Wittig, and ‘The Lorry’ by Peter Wahloo.Sonny Mehta became Editorial Director for Pan and Picador in 1974. He is shown below at PAN’s 50th birthday party along with Simon Master, one time MD of PAN, who died last year.
Alysoun at PAN got back to me regarding the ‘Golden PAN Award’ and gave me several more names and details so I’ve added them to the list, thanks Alysoun and I’ve altered the Herriot dates. At least three Picador titles have won the award namely ‘Unreliable Memoirs’ by Clive James, ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest’ by Ken Kersey and ‘The Lovely Bones’ by Alice Sebold. The latter was republished along with 11 other titles in 2012 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Picador. For more information go HERE

I shall be adding random Picador titles over the next few blogs so keep looking.

Now I know I must miss lots of things PAN related but it’s nice to find a couple when it’s not too late thanks to a reader for one and a lucky Google search from me for the other but weirdly both sort of linked.

Just before Christmas I got a letter from fellow PAN fan, Jeremy Birch, asking if I had spotted the article in ‘The Times’ from 6th August 2015 regarding Denise Maxwell Woosnam who was the D M W referred to on Page 4 in the first two PAN editions of ‘The Last Enemy’ by Richard Hillary? My ‘Times’ spotter had let me down on this but luckily Jem sent me a copy of the article.
As you can see I have found five different editions published by PAN from 1956 to 1976 in the UK while in the States it was published by Dell as ‘Falling Through Space’ in 1958.The second miss was on eBay where all my saved searches let me down and I missed a copy of the PAN catalogue from September 1969 which featured on the cover titles from the ‘Battle of Britain’ series of which ‘The Last Enemy was’ one.‘The Last Enemy’ is the book in the middle bottom row of the display stand and if  d***o ever wants to sell, you know where to find me! It was a bargain as they were the only bidder so it went for £5

And just to show I wasn’t immediately jumping on the Bowie bandwagon last week here is ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ by Walter Tevis from 1976. Actually it was because I haven’t been able to find my copy so until I do here’s one from the net.

Thanks to Stuart Radmore in Melbourne who now holds the record for the fastest comment in response to a blog. I asked if anyone knew any more names/titles to add to the ‘Golden PAN Award’ role of honour and he came up with ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ and he also let me know where I could find a photo of Le Carré holding it. I’ve added it to the page. Any more suggestions?

As a site that does ‘judge a book by its cover’ I am offering this couple as contenders for the ‘Most Boring PAN Cover Award’ that I have just instigated.

As PAN published at least two editions of these titles with different covers I am puzzled as to why they thought these would catch the eye. Click on them to see an alternative. Any more suggestions would be gratefully received!

Back in May 2015 I mentioned the books of mazes by Vladimir Koziakin and how I was waiting for Mazes for Fun 4′ to arrive in the post – well guess what turned up last week? I’ve also added ‘Gumbles on Guard’ with the Desmond Digby cover I picked up recently. I thought the Barbara Cartland nightmare was all behind me having found 129 titles but amazingly have now discovered another to bring the total up to 130. I’ll get around to rejigging the list one day but for now I’ve just stuck it on the end.

Finally every now and again I ‘google’ myself (doesn’t everyone?)  but nothing new comes up until just recently when I was most surprised and a bit chuffed to find I had been mentioned at the ‘Inclusive Learning Technologies Conference’ in Brisbane, Australia as follows ;
‘Back in 1976, pioneers like Steve Gensler in San Francisco and Paul Schwejda in Seattle were playing around with build-it-yourself kits which were to become the Apple, Commodore and Tandy computers released late the following year. This is how, as soon as these “micro-computers” arrived, Steve had an early “Unicorn Board” (later called “IntelliKeys”) ready for the Apple and Paul had cracked switch access for the Tandy. There were also switches and overlay keyboards ready for Apple with the “adaptive firmware card” Meanwhile in the UK, an old colleague of mine, Tim Kitchen of Walsall, had a working overlay keyboard paving the way for the enormously successful Concept Keyboard on the BBC computers of the 80s and early 90s which even outsold America’s IntelliKeys’
Now normally I’m just too modest to talk about my past (!) but I am left wondering, if this was true, where all the  money went? Just think of all those books I could have bought. Seriously they were good times really feeling as if you were making a worthwhile difference to those with varied special needs allowing them to access computer technology. That is the one part of my old job that I do miss.