Having found all the pictorial Cartland titles I had on my list I looked at other related bits and pieces I had including several autographed cards and letters. There was also a couple of photos and I decided to see which original book covers were shown.

On one of the blogs on ‘Today’s Inspiration’ I found the following;

“Earlier this week we learned from commentor Chad Sterling that Barbara Cartland refused to return any of the original paintings to Francis Marshall, instead framing them and hanging them on the walls of her mansion, which left Marshall feeling quite bitter. Ximena provides an eye witness confirmation of that sorry situation: “I once had tea with Barbara Cartland (possible title for an autobiography) and she had a whole wall with originals. They were a bit bigger than an A4, and so cool, all together like that, it made me really jealous.”

As Tom Watson pointed out in a follow-up comment, the practice of keeping illustrators’ originals under the assumption that the physical art was part of the purchase price of the reproduction rights was all too common for many decades – and rarely challenged by artists who feared rocking the boat and risking the loss of future assignments. From personal experience, (having had the experience many times in the early years of my career of not getting my original art back) I learned to always clarify the purchase terms of an assignment in writing up front”

I’ve put together a page HERE showing the covers including the one on the right behind her head which was not published by PAN. I’ve only gone for the obvious ones although I may try find some of the others from parts shown at a later time but I’ve not managed to identify the one at the bottom – any one know? Cartland was a staunched supporter of the St John Ambulance and a couple of the covers have links to that. I’ve also put on the truly awful PAN pink covers I threatened to do a couple of weeks ago!

I have been in contact with a cover artist who lives on a small island off the Scottish coast who wants to down size and travel so we have come to an amicable settlement regarding buying some PAN related original cover artwork she has. As it is quite a jaunt up there I’ve been lucky in that she had a visitor from Cambridge visiting who has kindly picked them up and I am collecting them from him this week. They will appear on the next few blogs.

I was sorry to hear of the death of Desmond Digby last week in Australia. He was on my list of ‘to contact’ book artists probably best known for illustrating the ‘Bottersnikes and Gumbles’ series by Sidney A Wakefield. I will put a page together to show the Piccolo editions in a later blog.

There was an advert for our local brew, Bank’s Beer, which said ‘Unspoilt By Progress’ and I’m pleased to say that applies to my PAN website. Because it doesn’t use anything fancy it passes the Google mobile friendly test, unlike my other two, as it is the same as it was in 1999. Back then it was at the cutting edge of technology using frames and a screen resolution of 800×600 when the standard was 640×480. I seem to remember having the amazing amount of hosting space of 10gb(!) so every image counted hence the small size of the oldest ones.

Just sorting books on the shelves and I started to realise how many copies of Arthur C Clarke titles I have. I’ll be putting together a few pages of them over the next months and todays is “Childhood’s End” written in August 1953. Still looking to identify some of the artists. Why couldn’t PAN be more like US publishers and acknowledge them which is why I’ve included the Ballantine as it lists Dean Ellis as the cover artist.

On a completely different note my son thinks my wife and I need to get out more so he is signing us up for interesting experiences such as aerial walkways, Segway riding, tobogganing and last Monday sky diving in a wind tunnel. I don’t think I was quite a supple as I needed to be. This was about as high as I got where as my wife and son went up over twenty feet!