I found the above in the ‘Newspaper Archives’ but as my subscription has run out I can’t check which paper or when, maybe when my ‘attack of the meanies’ has worn off I may renew. I wonder who might have won it or got a consolation prize, anyone out there?

I’m still adding more titles to the PAN Horizons series page which must have round about 70 titles in a list I’ve compiled from all the various lists inside the books. PAN has used many different well know cover artists and some I’ve contacted previously, some are no longer with us and some still to track down. I will try and get a copy of all the titles and put a scan on the one page but some of the prices asked are just ridiculous going into three figures!

UPDATE I have managed to track down at least one copy of the 69 ‘Horizons’ titles (number now confirmed thanks to Alysoun at PAN for a list) although there will be more on the page as some had a couple of  editions with different covers. I have bought 68 of them (still a few to arrive, fingers crossed they don’t get ‘lost in the post’) at a much more reasonable price, usually less than £2 so who pays the £121 pound asked for one I found – nobody by the looks of it!

The only one I couldn’t see for sale was “Those Summer Girls I Never Met” but luckily I found a very nice librarian in Waverley, New South Wales who had a copy and scanned in the front and back for me, thanks Sally.

This is a bit ‘old news’ now but something I mean to to link to in back 2017 namely a You Tube video from book cover designer Holly Dunn. She is talking about the titles PAN produced as part of their 70th Anniversary celebration and she explains that they are a lot clever than they appear at first glance. Click HERE to see it.

I recently spotted some artwork for sale by Stuart Bodek which was listed as for an unknown cover. I recognised it as the Sphere edition of “Rich” by Graham Masterton and as it was not too expensive I bought it. You can clearly see the original is signed but the book cover has a blurb added right across it. I’ve added it to Stuart’s page HERE along with some more Sphere titles from the same series, possibly with covers by Stuart, but ‘Rich’ is the only one that wraps around. I’ve also added three of Stuart’s from  PAN Horizons, the only ones that I’ve found so far.

I was pleased to get a copy of the Macmillan newsletter from PAN Archivist Alysoun that contained an article by John Handford about founder of PAN Books, Alan Bott. You can read all the newsletter by clicking  HERE but if you just want to read about Alan jump to page 10. Pleased to find there was a plug for the website at the end, thanks John.

I’ve also added to the ‘PAN As Seen on Television’ page but yet again it was ‘Bargain Hunt’ on 12th Novemeber 2019. Natasha Raskin Sharp was doing the summing up in front of a book carousel and I managed to spot a PAN title. If you can’t see it click on the picture below to go to find the answer.

As a sideline to PAN Books I also like to see if I can get hold of the Press Campaign Books that went with film releases and especially if they mention PAN as tie-ins.
Here are a couple which show how much importance was placed on the book from very little to nearly a whole page. The books in question are ‘Von Ryan’s Express‘ and ‘Mayerling‘ I’ve also included a coup of other Westheimer titles from PAN.

Having found Linda Goodman’s book ‘Sun Signs’ as below I have also discovered she did twelve others for each sign of the zodiac. I have six so far and I am just wondering if it is worth trying to get all of them, have I better things to do with my life and my money? Click HERE to see the ones so far. I’m tempted to get all twelve to see if I can cut and paste the images off the front to make a complete circle! The covers are by Maggie Kneen and I contacted her and she kindly replied “Dear Tim, I’m not sure what happened to the artwork; I think it must have been in a portfolio that went missing years ago. I did enjoy that job, which was done in the 1980s in my London bedsit days. Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs was my teenage ‘bible’, so I felt immensely lucky and proud to have been given the job. Esoteric projects often seemed to come my way, as I illustrated Psycards, and the Old English Tarot as well. I’ll have another think about it and let you know if I’m wrong and the artwork is still in a drawer somewhere. Best wishes, Maggie Kneen”

…. and a quick reminder if you are in Wolverhampton the pop up bookshop is there again in the Wulfrun Centre until 28th November. Good selection of book, hardback and paperback, fiction and non fiction plus magazines and comics. I was pleased I got a couple of PANs in very good condition to replace ones that could be described as ‘reading copies’

I’ve mentioned before the ‘Topliners‘ series written for reluctant readers in their teens which PAN started to publish in 1968 but, apart from odd titles in the Piccolo series, there weren’t titles aim specifically at main stream teenagers until the ‘PAN Horizons’ series first launched in 1986.

There had been the ‘Heartlines‘ series from 1965 but that was really just romance for girls. ‘PAN Horizons‘ was for 14 to 16 year olds, male and female, with titles from well know authors covering pertinent topics. The first fifteen had uniform covers by artists such as Gary Keane (of sports illustrations fame) Paul Finn and Kaye Hodges (or Kage as she is listed on one book cover) I have made contact with Kaye and it turns out there is not enough money to be made as an artist these days so she now works at Maidstone Hospital which by a weird coincidence is where our first Grandchild was born just over three weeks ago. We have an open invite to visit her in her studio when we are next down visiting. Kaye kindly sent me a couple of photos of her original works, one for a Corgi and one for a Horizons cover on the page.. Click on the image below to see the original of the Corgi title.

The first titles for the Horizons series followed the same format with an eye catching painting for the cover but later they changed to a photo cover for some plus altering the spine logo when they dropped the word PAN from the series name. I’ve included a few that have not arrived yet, hence it says WEB if I’ve found a good image or title if not and no artists name.

The novel ‘Odette’ by Jerrard Tickell was first published in 1955 as PAN GP35, as X368 in 1965, in 1971 and again in 1972 each time with a different cover and in my opinion not always for the best. I’ve tried to find out if there are any more but not discovered any yet. I’ve put individual editions on their respective pages but also put all four together HERE

If there was competition for the most pages in a PAN book I think ‘….And Ladies of the Club’ by Helen Hoover Santmyer (possible contender for longest name as well)  would win. The first edition has just 1176 pages but is the larger size whereas the 1988 edition is the more normal size and has 1433 measuring just over two inches thick. I’ve look along the shelves and can’t see anything that comes anywhere near it so at the moment, and unless you know better it is in number one place. The cover of the first edition is by Pam Masco who painted a lot of the PAN covers including Monica Dickens covers and the later is by Stuart Bobek also mentioned previously.

Jane Frank of ‘WOW Art’ is having one of her sales and this time it’s for ‘Halloween’ and I would love to buy the Keith Scaife cover for ‘The Werewolves in London’ but at $800 plus $87 for postage with a $15 discount it’s a bit more than I want to pay.

Having become Grandparents for the first time on the 15th of this month we had to hold off visiting due to me having a cold but by the 27th we had decided I was no longer a risk and journeyed down to Kent to see William. He was named William as there were Williams on both sides of the families although my daughter is already referring to him as ‘Billy’ as the surname is Kitchen and for those aficionados of ‘The Peaky Blinders’ you may remember there was a character by that name who apparently was a real person. Now I don’t want to name drop especially as I think I’ve mentioned this before but my wife was at school with the writer of the ‘Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight.

Just spotted this on the PAN Macmillan twitter page, well done Adam.

Thanks to Kathy emailing me bits and pieces as she finds them I’m adding to pages as I go along. I mentioned I’m making a list of Sam Peffer’s photos and the covers I think they go with which will be a long term project so pop back now and again to see the updates. A couple of pages I’ve updated are ‘Sinners and Shrouds‘ where Kathy sent me the photo used for the finished pose and another cover, Panther not PAN, showing Sam’s boots used on the cover of the ‘The Cretan Runner

After making contact with the buyer of the 70 plus original artworks by Hans Helweg I bought a couple of the more obscure ones as they were within my price range. They were the two Morton Thompson titles PAN published in 1969 and although Alysoun at PAN tells me there were 25,000 copies of ‘Not As A Stranger’ printed that year I am having to make do with a scan of the printers proof as I can’t find a copy anywhere, anyone got one? I do have a copy of ‘The Cry and the Covenant’ but I need one in better condition. Now if I want a copy of ‘Not As A Stranger’ from 1959 listed as M1 there seems to be dozens probably because it went through so many printings with the same cover surprisingly also by Hans Helweg. The list I have that Hans complied of his covers seems to skip 1969 but around that time he was being paid £58.16 a cover.

As has been mention several times Colin Larkin of  pop music books fame has been writing one covering the artists and artwork of the first 25 years of PAN Books. Due to several unforeseen circumstances it is only now finished and should be going off to the publisher this month for release in the New Year.  Colin sent me a very brief but full of feeling email saying “It’s frickin’ finished — after 30 bleedin’ years — its finished” which sounds like the words of a very happy man. The final piece was trying to find a copy of the photo of Sam Peffer posing as the figure on the front of ‘The One-Eyed Witness’ The only one on several sites was the one I had had on mine and was much too small to be used in a publication. Unfortunately in my ‘Great Computer Crash of 2104’ I lost all the originals but once again Kathy came to the rescue and found an image we could use (everything is now backup in triplicate) Annoyingly I can’t find my copy of the book to rescan that was signed by PEFF and says he’s the model hence the one on the page is enlarged poorly!

Since I put the Bond cover negatives on Facebook there has been a lot of interest shown in them and in fact there are now references to them on a couple of sites. Click on the banners below to see the articles.

My normal reading matter is something in the adventure/detective line but someone recently mentioned a couple of books  featuring the village I live in. I’ve now read them both and found them not as bad as I thought and I did find myself reading ‘Essie’ quite fast to see what happened in the end. The reason I mention it is because it has a cover by Colin Backhouse and I’ve managed to find all of one cover he painted for PAN, are there any more?

I’ve decided I’m not going to do a negative a week as it could take forever so I’ll just add them to Sam Peffer’s page as I work them out (not all the ones listed have a page yet, more for my reference) It will also include Arrow, Hodder and Digit covers  as I’ve found a few of those to go alongside the PAN’s.

As promised recently here is a link to the four covers David Scutt painted for PAN with a very recognisable one amongst them.

Although not PAN I’ve been trying to get hold of the last two Tom Adams covers for titles by Sue Grafton in her ‘Alphabet’ series. I was short of ‘E’ and ‘F’ but luckily spotted them amongst a bundle on eBay but as the price was not that much and the postage was the same as often quoted for one book I went ahead. I have now added them to the page HERE

I was really pleased to get an email from Miles Deverson with a link to an item for the ‘PAN Books as see on film’ section. It’s ‘Quiet Morning’ featuring everyday family life in suburban North London as seen by folk learning English in 1955. It’s worth watching it all especially those who grew up with the ‘Ladybird’ reading scheme but the most interesting part is at 8 minutes 15 seconds. Click HERE for the link. Still trying to work out if they are PAN’s in the stacks?

This weeks negatives are for ‘Sinners and Shrouds’ by Jonathan Latimer

When I was vising Kathy Ford looking at Sam Peffer’s props amongst them were a pair of boots and an army hat. I’m still trying to track down the cover featuring the hat as modelled by Burt Kwouk (the ‘go to’ far Eastern character model)  The boots are shown on the cover of ‘The Spoletta Story‘ and I’ll see if there is a negative to go with this. I’ve also included an earlier version of the cover by Clixby Watson that was not used.

I bought a piece of artwork last week on eBay that was NOT Pan but I liked the look of it. It had been on a while getting cheaper and cheaper with each relisting and then was make an offer. As usual I offered something ridiculously low and amazingly it was accepted.
The artist, David Scutt,  made contact to say the postage and packing was a lot and would I like to meet up halfway to pass it on. It then transpired David had four more covers in the series and would I like them and at the same price for each as I paid for the one eBay to which I said “Yes please”
We met up at the National Trust property of Upton House which has not featured in ‘PAN Books as seen in NT properties’ as it doesn’t have any that I’ve noticed. 
David had in the meantime found another four covers making a total of nine of the ten covers in this series. The tenth one David gave to a friend who helped him with the research.
Click HERE to see the Rex Stout ‘Nero Wolfe ‘ covers from Sphere.
David painted at least four covers for PAN of which I have two and the others should be in the post so watch for a link in a future blog..

As promised here is another photo from the negative showing the composition for a cover. This time it’s ‘Gently with the Painters’ which would be one of my favourites if it wasn’t for the ‘green man’ absent from the original. Kathy Ford says she still has these paintbrushes.

I don’t know why but I quite like the ‘An introduction to 50 …..” titles in the PAN Literature Guides series. There are 9 with a fifty reference and a tenth just Shakespeare which slightly spoils it. I think it’s the selection of fonts that just lifts them out of the ‘a bit boring’ category. Click HERE to see them.

Maurice of Zardoz Books recently put up for sale a copy of ‘So Long and Thanks for All the Fish’ which came from the library of Douglas Adams. It was not just any PAN copy but a book of blank pages with this label inside.

The  price was just within my limits so for nine days I was the winning bidder but six minutes before the auction was up we had to go out and of course it went to someone else who had bigger pockets than me as the final price was just over £156. Just wondering if it was a PAN fan, a Douglas Adams fan or something else?

I’ve now made a page showing a second title linked to some of the many negatives I have of Sam Peffer and relatives/friends/actors posing for PAN covers. It is G130 ‘Casualty‘ by Robert Romanis. I put some of the Bond negatives I’ve found on a Facebook site and have had several request to use them on websites and in magazines as they have never been seen before. I’ve got three negatives of the four Bond covers Sam painted and if I find the last one I’ll put them all on one page or just the three if I can’t.

As a bonus HERE is a negative for one of Sam’s slightly saucy movie posters. It features Sam’s brother with his own taxi and Sam’s wife, Kitty looking in to it. I checked with Sam’s relatives this was OK and they were quite happy for it to appear. 

Kitty was 97 last Friday so I will wish her a belated ‘Very Happy Birthday”