Jackie Collins RIP

It was a sad surprise to hear on the radio yesterday morning that Jackie Collins had died. As I get older 77 now seems to be no age at all but unfortunately breast cancer is no respecter of age. I have not met her but I have met people who were present when she visited the PAN offices and they were all unanimous in saying what a charming and unassuming lady she was.

In the top photo she is with Ken Hatherley and George Sharp while below with Peter Tietjen.I had only just received the latest chapter to her book as a member of her Fan Club and eventually managed to find my dedicated photo. She won at least 5 Golden PAN awards for selling over a million copies of a title.

I’m sorry to say I do cannot lay my hands on any of her books published by PAN at the moment so have resorted to the net to make the following compilation of examples.

“The Hills Are Alive ……….. with the sound of chuffing”

Just back from a very enjoyable ten days on the continent travelling around using ‘The Little Trains of Austria’ hence this rather brief blog. Looks like we had a narrow escape as I’ve just heard on the news that Germany reinstated border checks with it and Austria yesterday because of the refugee crisis. They must have had a lie in as luckily there was no sign at of anything at around 9:30 when we crossed.

I’ve returned to find I have successful located another one of the many Daphne du Maurier covers which I’ve tacked onto the bottom of her page. It is ‘The Progress of Julius’ and after my moan about not knowing what edition one would get from unhelpful sellers it turned out to actually be the one in the photo.

In the not quite PAN section I have a few more additions sent me from Tomislav in Croatia. He works as a beer salesman and as one of the most popular brands over there is PAN he gets bits and pieces.
I’m really disappointed in that I didn’t get a shot of the Sun Chemicals Inks Division at Ternat in Belgium. They bought out Coates Brothers who produced the ‘invisible ink’ for the puzzle series from Piccolo to which I’ve added a couple of new covers. We drove passed it and I didn’t manage to get a photo but though “Never mind, that’s what Google Streetview is for” BUT on Google all I get are views of lovely green fields. No wonder I hadn’t noticed it before when we’ve gone that way.

Finally I always like to leave my mark so I helpfully left all the computers in the hotel lobby in Liege logged into an excellent website.

All at Sea with PAN Books!

In 1947 there was a paper shortage in the UK for printing books so to get around this PAN had early titles printed in France where paper was more readily available. This gave rise to the problem of transportation so PAN purchased the ex Royal Navy Motor Launch 225 and used it to carry books down the Seine from Paris, across the Channel and then up the Thames to Kingston Wharf. The boat was built in 1941 at Brightlingsea by Aldous and was offered for disposal in October 1945.Unfortunately the above cutting got the name of the boat wrong and added an ‘o’. If you click HERE you can see a photo of ‘Lalun’ ( the name of a prostitute in Kipling’s ‘short story ‘On the City Wall’) moored up at Kingston Wharf and as far as I know this may be a world exclusive thanks to Adrian Bott, Alan Bott’s Grandson lending me a photo album, more from which later. Interesting that the article says the books were intended ‘chiefly for export’

Kingston-upon-Thames Wharf

Fellow PAN Fan Jules Burt is looking for funds to purchase equipment so he can produce high quality images for a book. He is probably most well known for his ‘penguinaday’ but he is also going to show other publishers including, and this caught my interest, PAN so if you want to help and find out more go HERE

Finally yet another moan about book sellers who cannot be bothered to check their titles to verify an edition shown with a ‘stock photo’ I’ve used this dealer in the past who has been quite happy to check but now they say “Regrettably I will be unable to confirm this information for you as our warehouse operation is not set up to enable us to. As we carry a very large inventory it is difficult to search for specific information. The listing is generally connected via the ISBN or EAN for media, which should give you all the required information.” Funny how they can find the book quickly enough if I want to buy it and it’s all very well saying I can return it if not happy, I’d just rather they could answer a simple question – does it look like the photo in the listing?

Here’s Johnny!

Suprisingly managed to set up a visit from Johnny Mains last Saturday. I was supposed to be in Austria but dates changed and when I saw Johnny was visiting a bookshop locally (the one from which I’m banned) I invited him over. I think he liked my collection of books including the PANs , commenting on the quantity, something my wife often does, but not with the same feeling! Here are a couple of selfies he’s posted on line plus a photo I took of him holding a copy of ‘Tales of the Supernatural’ I gave him as his had disappeared.

Johnny is working on several different things at the moment but is hoping to get his ‘PAN Book of Horror Stories Scrapbook’ out before Christmas. Here is a rough draft of the cover.
Just added another screen capture to the ‘PAN as Seen on TV’ section with a shot of presenter Paul Martin from ‘Flog It’ on BBC1 26th August 2015. He was walking down a corridor at Prideux Place in Cornwall and I noticed on the right there were several PAN editions of Georgette Heyer titles of various vintage (sorry about the page formatting as it has life of its own and screws everything up whenever I add anything to it. It will get a complete rebuild – one day)

Lastly sad to see ‘Reader’s World’ second-hand bookshop in Birmingham has closed down. I’m not surprised as I rarely saw anyone in there when I undertook my twice yearly visit to say ‘Hi’ to some old friends that had been on the shelves for many a year.

Australian Special

I was going to try and tie this in with an Australian holiday but missed what sounded like a great idea namely “Picnic Day” on 1st August in the Northern Territory.

I’m going to look at three titles with an Australian link.

“Variable Winds at Jalna” was printed in the UK but only has prices on the back for Australia and Canada. On the front is a sticker I’ve seen before which I’m presuming was put on by an Australian distributor? Can anyone enlarge on that?
I found a website that said the cover was by Gordon King and I was really pleased as I have the original artwork but it is not signed. I contacted Gordon who wrote back to say it is DEFINATELY not one of his and he only did 4 of the 16 in the Jalna series.

I’ve not seen this Piccolo title on sale anywhere but in Australia so maybe it was one exclusively for there, the only Australian printed Piccolo I’ve come across. The cover is by Walter Cunningham who was born in 1910 in Surrey, England and emigrated to Australia in 1924. He joined the staff of John Sands in 1926 eventually becoming manager of the art department. He died in August 1988 at Mona Vale, New South Wales.

The last title was printed in Australia but on the back cover the only price says it was £1.75 in the UK. Is this a rare case of books being sent from Australia and priced here in the UK instead of the usual other way around? The cover looked like it could be by Paul Sample (Tom Sharpe covers) and so I emailed him to ask if he remembers doing it or if I’ve insulted him as well by implying it could be one of his. He replied very promptly to say;

Dear Tim
Yes, it is one of my illustrations, dating from the early 70’s……….I can remember drawing it, dip pen, ink and watercolour. I did quite a few bookjacket illustrations besides all the ones for Tom Sharpe’s books. Not all of the jackets were for Pan though.
Cheers,
Paul

Original Artwork from Alan Cracknell etc.

First blog since upgrading to Windows 10 – so far so good!

I mentioned in the last blog I was trying to contact an artist, namely Alan Cracknell, but no success so far but then again I may not have the right one. The artwork this time features his interpretation of that famous character form Enid Blyton “Mr Twiddle” in “Hello Mr. Twiddle” There were three titles in this series but only two were published by PAN under the Piccolo imprint who didn’t include “Don’t Be Silly Mr. Twiddle” I’ve also included a couple of his other Blyton covers. I’ll put on another piece of his artwork soon.Alan was born in Harrow in 1937 and attended art school before working as an illustrator in advertising in London eventually became freelance.
“His beautifully detailed artwork influenced by Russian Icons and Medieval miniatures incorporates Nursery Rhyme Characters, Flora and Fauna, Field names and Artifacts in a surreal manner into his work. Medieval meets Alice in Wonderland” (Bell Fine Arts)

I meant to include this cutting last month when it actually appeared but it went missing and turned up a bit ripped!Pan published three Morph titles under the Piccolo imprint where Tony Hart is shown on the covers but it is Peter Lord who is credited inside.

Mastering the beast before being let loose in the woods.

….. and finally, although this is probably ‘old hat’ to all of you and for once nothing to do with books I got around to having a ‘Segway Experience’ last week. I was quite pleased, for once, to be told off for going too fast around the corners but as I didn’t crash into anything or fall off I thought I’d mastered it pretty well!

Bookseller, New Scanner and Violette Szabo

As I’ve told my wife so many times I just can’t help buying books and now I’ve discovered why. It’s in the genes as both my Great Great Great Grandfather and Great Great Uncle (both named Charles Lowe) ran ‘The Great Book Mart’ in New Street Birmingham from around 1855 to 1903. I’m putting together pages with some of their bits and pieces like fliers and signed books they published plus miscellaneous newspaper cuttings. Unfortunately the firm came to a sudden end as shown below.Trying to scan documents for the above has been proving difficult as I’ve only had an A4 scanner up to now. I set out this week just to buy an A3 scanner and ended up with an all singing, all dancing wireless scanner/printer/fax/phone with 3 media drawers etc. but it still won’t let me stack up a pile of books to automatically feed through and scan. Am I asking too much? I’m sure it must be possible which reminds me of my Sony C7 Betamax Recorder which had a Betastack. This allowed you to stack four tapes with either a different recording on each or twelve hours continuous recording apart from the two minute tape changeover when the most important bit of the film usually happened! This was almost completely mechanical and I was really pleased to find this site about it. I still have it all in the loft somewhere.

More original artwork scans next week when I have mastered the new scanning beast but in tribute to Violette Szabo G. C. whose medals were sold at auction this week I’ve rescanned G105 ‘Carve Her Name With Pride’ signed by the author R. J. Minney.

Mark Peppé etc.

This weeks original artwork is the Piccolo 1972 edition of ‘The Foxhole’ by Ian Southall with cover artwork by Mark Peppé. Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to get a good photo with my camera and the colours are no where near as washed out as they appear. I think a visit to the library to use their photocopier is called for again.

Hector1 I recently picked up a copy of ‘Make and Share’ from the HECTOR CLUB which was started by the charity ‘Help the Aged’ I have only found the one title so far but I have added a few of the club badges plus details of a competition winner and his ‘wonderful’ prize!

I recently featured the original artwork for a couple of slightly salacious covers for Caldwell titles by artist Hans Helweg. Helweg painted many titles for PAN and one day I’ll get around to putting them all on one page but he also did a two/three covers for Piccolo featuring ‘Oggy the Hedgehog’ The reason I put two/three is in two of them if definitely states Hans produced the covers and illustrations but in the third he is only credited with illustrating the contents.

Peter Charles artwork etc.

This weeks original artwork is by Peter Charles It is the cover for ‘The House At World’s End’ by Monica Dickens. There were three other titles in the ‘World’s End’ series published by Piccolo in the 70’s all with cover artwork by the same artist. Any information on Peter Charles would be gratefully received.

I’ve also been checking up on other pages that have been on the site for a while and realied I’ve been a title short on one of the Alfred Hitchcock pages namely ‘Stories Not For The Nervous Book 2’ which I’ve now rectified.

Another page I’ve now updated was showing the four titles in the ‘Rogue Herries’ series by Hugh Walpole with covers by John Raynes. I’ve added later editions with photo covers but not really too sure if I like them.

…. and finally is this a record for a first edition of ‘Casino Royale’ on eBay?

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