I have heard back from Nicholas Blake from PAN/Macmillan who tells me unfortunately there isn’t a definitive list of Golden PAN Award winners so I see that as a challenge. I have started to make a list on a page which can be seen HERE or use the link at the top. If you know of any more that we can add then please email suggestions to tim@tikit.net or add them as a comment.

I’m going to add photos. press cutting etc to the page and here is one as a starter about Peter Benchley and ‘JAWS’ from 1975

I mentioned ‘The Iron Tiger’ with a cover by Keith Scaife about which Keith said
“The one thing I do remember clearly is a sense of embarrassment over the cover for The Iron Tiger……  The publishers didn’t supply me with the whole novel to read whilst I was working out my rough ideas, just a couple of photocopied pages of the relevant passage they wanted illustrating – a Bedford truck on a mountain pass. Unfortunately, out of context I didn’t realise the time the story was set in and picked a 1970s Bedford to paint. It wasn’t until after the book was published that I found out it was WWII era…..  Readers must have wondered what on earth I was doing!!”
Well I’ve cheered Keith up in researching the truck he used and finding it was actually from 1952 and as the story line is set in the time of the Chinese invasion of Tibet he was only really a couple of years premature.

I mentioned PAN publishing their book of party games for Golden Wonder crisps and then found an article in ‘The Times’ which mentioned PAN publishing books as promotions for Gibb’s toothpaste, Nestlé’s chocolate, Beecham’s powders and White Satin gin but no luck searching all the usual sources. Does any of these ring a bell with anyone?

Finally one more for the “As Seen on Television” section. On the ‘Celebrity Antiques Roadtrip” last Tuesday they visited ‘Fanny’s Antiques’ in Reading and firstly showed a bookcase in the distance and then a close-up but fast scan down it. The Dick Francis titles are fairly obvious but I’ve given up trying to work out what some of the others on the lower shelves are. I’ve actually got around to sorting out the crazy formatting on this page. I eventually change the font from Arial to Verdana and all was OK and no I don’t understand why this affected the picture spacing either!

Here’s hoping for a great 2016 and that we can all fully experience the feeling of a new word I’ve just learnt after watching ‘University Challenge’ The word is VELLICHOR and means “the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time”

For the last few months of 2015 I’ve been trying to track down as many Jack Higgins covers that were published by PAN in the 70’s and 80’s. So far I’ve got 25 different titles with 42 different covers showing variants. I’m left wondering why there are 3 different versions of ‘SOLO’ all dated 1981? I’ve included 3 that are scans of the very small covers shown on the inside of the double editions. I have all the others shown but no luck with these.

Right –  an PAN/Rupa Indian edition from 1983.

In a few weeks I’m hoping to include some material from Keith Scaife who painted 6 of the Jack Higgins covers including ‘The Iron Tiger’ which shows a 1970’s Bedford when it should be a WW11 one! I’m also trying to find out if Higgins won a Golden PAN Award for selling over a million copies of any one title. ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ has sold over fifty million copies worldwide but how many were actually sold by PAN? I have contacted Alysoun Sanders, archivist at PAN/MacMillan and hope she can provide some answers when she is back in her office after the festive break.

Talking of Golden PAN awards I see there is a bit of controversy over ‘The Diary of a Young Girl‘ and copyright issues. The 70 years should have expired on the 1st January this year but the Ann Frank Fund claim it was jointly written by Ann and her father Otto  and so the 70 years is extended until 70 years after his death. You can read the full details in ‘The Guardian’ article HERE which includes the picture of Otto holding a Golden PAN and if you want to read the online version of the diary as was promised by Isabelle Attard  you can find it HERE (the only problem is that it is in the original Dutch)

As this will be the last blog before Christmas I thought I’d join in the festivities by looking through my book(s) of party games written by Joseph Edmundson. The problem arises as to which one as PAN actually published nine variations over the years from 1958 to at least 1974 with some as PANs, some as Pipers and one for Golden Wonder crisps. Later versions became amalgamations of the first and second books. Click HERE to see all the versions I’ve found so far.
Joseph Edmundson, according to the cover blurb, was Director of Physical Education at the London Polytechnic and was an expert of many branches of entertainment and the author of ‘The PAN Book of Health’ PAN did publish another book of party games but under the Piccolo imprint but this was not by Edmundson but by Deborah Manley and Peta Ree ‘The Piccolo Book of Party Games’

I was watching ‘O What I lovely War’ when I noticed in the credits the name Charles Chilton and found it was the same writer as featured in a previous blog. There is also a connection in that Brian Sanders painted the original film poster as well as many PAN covers. There is a third tenuous link in that Len Deighton is also credited as a writer and Raymond Hawkey designed three of Deighton’s book covers including ‘The Ipcress File’ as well as ‘Thunderball’ for PAN who then used Hawkey’s format for the other thirteen Bond titles.

I ‘googled’ to see what happened on the 16th December 1999 and I can find no mention of one momentous occasion in the last century namely the birthday of this website so Happy Birthday to tikit.net which will be 16 years old on the 16th this week.

Talking of birthdays reminded me of a puzzle that has literally been around for years and that is ‘When should PAN be celebrating its anniversaries?’ In 1957 the PAN Record magazine claimed that year was the 10th anniversary so they had decided to count from the year PAN title numbered one was published and not from 1944 when PAN Books was established or from 1945 when PAN actually published its first book.

It is made more confusing by PAN publishing in conjunction with CQ magazine ‘Native Tongue’ by Carl Hiassen with PAN 50 Years on the spine. Inside it states it was published in 1992 but it could be old text with a new cover but on the last page it shows 8/95 which ties in with my assertion but not PAN’s who celebrated 50 years in 1997.

After mentioning Wikipedia deleting David Tayler’s page last week I’m pleased to report I have since found this site Deletionpedia which I hope means he’ll live on in cyberspace. He is on my list of artists whose work deserve their own page.

Finally here is another newspaper clipping that mentions an author receiving the ‘Golden PAN Award’

Pamela Belle was born in Ipswich on June 16th 1952. From the  Goodreads website;
“Belle always wanted to be an author and wrote her first book at the age of twelve after visited the site of a lovely Elizabethan manor house called Rushbrooke and observing the bare, moated island which was all that was left. She wanted to bring Rushbrooke back and chose to do so in print. Over the next few years ‘The Epic’, as it became known, grew and grew. Belle drew up a huge family tree and a plan of the house very like Rushbrooke.
Married and a teacher of a class of six-year-olds, she wrote in longhand and, while publishers made encouraging noises, no one was prepared to risk publishing a large book by an unknown author. Eventually the agent Vivienne Schuster was wonderfully enthusiastic about it and found a publisher.
“The Moon in the Water” and its two sequels were published in the UK and the USA with considerable success. Belle gave up teaching in 1985 to spend more time researching and writing. She plans to write a book about Alfred the Great if she can fit it in between looking after the children, dogs, cats and husband”
I’ve put together a page of covers showing the 11 titles published by PAN with a couple of variants. Interestingly the first two have covers by Stephen Bradbury so I’ve added them to his page plus ‘The Wind from the Sun’ by Arthur C. Clarke as this is also one of his.

I’ve attempted to contact Kevin Tweddle who painted some of the Belle covers plus many more for PAN. He retired to run a pub so if I don’t get a reply I think a visit is called for. I have also emailed Mark Viney without success so far but I do occasionally strike lucky and I am now in communication with an artist who painted Jack Higgin’s covers. More in a later blog.

Just as a tail note we recently stayed at the hotel built on the site of my Great Great Great Grandfather’s second hand bookshop where his son hung himself in 1903. I was chatting to one of the staff and casually asked if she had seen any ghosts to which she replied “No but I sometimes feel as if someone is standing behind me when I’m was in the basement” It was in the basement that Charles hung himself!

Juliette Benzoni was born Andrée-Marguerite-Juliette Mangin in Paris on October the 30th 1920. She is probably most well know for her ‘Catherine’ and ‘Marianne’ series of novels published by PAN.
I will get around to rescanning the ‘Catherine‘ titles soon but I have scanned the ‘Marianne‘ at a higher resolution. I have also included the PAN edition of ‘The Lure of the Falcon’ on that page. There were four titles in this series featuring Gilles Goelo but this was the only one published by PAN. ‘The Devil’s Diamonds’ was published in English by Sphere but the last two titles ‘The Treasure’ and ‘Haunte-Savanne’ were not translated into English.

After mentioning Christopher Wood and ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ last week I received the following comment from Mike Pretty “A little Christopher Wood footnote for you. I used to work for Jonathan Cape (and Pan, but that’s another story) and I edited The Spy Who Loved Me for publication. I can’t remember why, but it was decided that the girl who was going to be eaten so graphically by a shark needed a name. I was about to get married, so I inserted my fiancee’s maiden name just as a placeholder until we talked about it. Wood wasn’t bothered either way, so in she stayed. Luckily Kate was amused!” Mike married Kate Chapman who sadly died all too young of cancer.

…. and finally I’ve added another cover ‘A Prayer For The Dying’ to George Sharp‘s page who gave me this snippet regarding the model when I ask if he was the same one he also used for ‘Six Fingered Stud and the Bodie covers “Yes, Tim, that’s Niall Reidy from the ‘Ugly’ agency. I gave him the original painting of him being the horny slave master with an adoring sex slave hugging his thigh – to hang in his lavatory. He became a close pal before he disappeared to live in Australia. Niall was a giant of a man who used to pick me up and hug me as if I was a child. Naill was fun. The best-looking ‘ugly’ model I ever met”