Having returned late last night from a long but very cheap coach trip weekend away in Belgium (made even longer by 2 people having out of date passports only discovered on returning to the UK which now means the driver’s passport gets confiscated until sorted so we couldn’t leave them behind even though most people wanted to!) I realised I’d forgotten this weeks blog so bit shorter than usual. On the plus side we did get to see(?) the De Panne 19th Endurance cycle race on the beach in thick fog. It also had a second hand bookshop and I was pleasantly surprised to find four in Rochester when we called in for a couple of hours on the way down to Folkstone. Unfortunately couldn’t find anything I wanted to buy at a price I was willing to pay!

Last week I was moving books around and picked up a copy of “Last Seen Wearing” by Hillary Waugh and happened to glance at the back where there is a supposed memo to PAN from P.C. After racking my brains I came up with Peter Cheyney as fitting all the criteria and so contacted Adrian at his excellent Peter Cheyney site to see if he agreed. It was then that Adrian pointed out that Cheyney died in 1951 and the book was from 1960, maybe it just takes PAN along time to make decisions – nine years?

I cannot discover who the artists were for either of the variations of cover but the 64/66 variation is in a series and I have a scan of the original artwork for ‘The Neon Jungle’ but is listed as artist unknown. I presume the same artist did all of these so will check on the others.This has inspired me to look at more back covers, something which is on my to do list plus scanning them and getting them on the site along with larger rescans of all the titles.

Every now and again I see a cover and there is just something about it that makes it stand out but I’m not always sure why. One such cover was the 1972 edition of ‘The Guardians Of Time’ by Poul Anderson. I know of three editions of this published by PAN, the 1964 having a cover by W Francis Phillipps but no idea for the 1977 edition. I only know the artist for 1972 after a Google search turned up a website showing the original artwork. Ian Miller was born in 1946 and grew up in London and Manchester. Between 1963 and 1967 he enrolled at Northwich School of Art, before embarking on a degree at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, where he began to paint and graduating with honours in 1970. Miller’s earliest work included magazine and book jacket illustrations, including a host of illustrations for paperback titles. I am currently putting together a page of covers he produced for PAN, watch this space.

Back in June we visited Thomas Hardy’s cottage in Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford (we also paid our respects at his grave in Stinsford churchyard) Unfortunately I couldn’t find any PAN’s lurking on shelves to add to my series of ‘PANs Spotted In Historic Buildings’ but I can add to my collection of photos of ‘Famous Toilets I’ve Sat On’Hardy did not feature in PAN’s early booklists very often as I can only find PAN 268 “The Mayor of Casterbridge” from 1953 and PAN M207 “Far from the Madding Crowd” from 1967. PAN 268 has a cover by the elusive artist R Sax of whom very little appears to be known, can anyone help? As I’ve mentioned before I have a CD of over 500 examples of original PAN cover artwork and 23 of these are confirmed as Sax with several more listed as Sax? so I’ve made a page of those which are definitely his.

Later, in the days of ISBNs, PAN published “Tales from Wessex” as a TV tie-in in 1973 and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” in 1979 as a film tie-in.

In 1978 they published eight of Hardy’s titles (images acquired from the net)

PAN also published accompanying Brodies Notes for most Hardy titles.
FOOTNOTE – After contacting the CEO of the company hosting my WordPress blog in frustration to complain about the erratic loading speeds I actually got an email from him almost straight away telling me he was on holiday but passing on  my concern to a senior person. I later got a call from him to apologise and since then things seem better so fingers crossed.

While sorting through a pile of ‘special’ duplicates (ones that are not good enough for the shelf but have something to make me keep them) I’d forgotten the 3 Charles Chilton signed titles I’d bought on eBay last year. They came with a photo of Charles Chilton holding ‘The World In Peril’ when he was interviewed by the BBC for a programme of which I can find no record – does it ring a bell with anyone?

Eric Malpass, who died 18 years ago last week, had three of his books published by PAN ‘Morning’s At Seven’, ‘At The Height Of The Moon’ and ‘Fortinbras Has Escaped‘ The first two titles were very popular in Germany where they were both made into films with music by James Last.

One book that has been on my shelf for quite a while is ‘I Owe Russia $1200’ which cost me 50p and is a bargain as it has been signed by Bob Hope (!) I could believe that a charity shop would not think it genuine (if they actually spotted it) but having looked at other samples of his signature I’m not ruling it out as apparently he was a prolific signer.

I have several proof copies of titles with my favourite being ‘The PAN Book of Charm’ by Barbara Cartland which she proof read herself and signed on the cover to approve it (I acquired this from a shop in Hungary) Somehow she got her mothers DOB wrong so she has had to changed her mother’s age several times. I have quite a few other proof copies but the most interesting one I think  is not from PAN but Heinemann. It is for the 1961 title ‘Mrs Gallop’s Mistake’ by Josephine Blumenfeld. The PAN connection is that she was PAN’s founder Alan Bott’s wife. The reason I find this interesting is that as far as I can tell it was never published although the title was used for one of her collection of short stories published as ‘Birds In The Roof” by Heinemann in 1960. I have yet to track down a photo of her so if any one can help please get in touch.

I intended to put this up on Frank Garvin Yerby’s birthday but I have only just managed to track down a couple of the covers I was missing. He was born in Augusta, Georgia and died in Madrid and was know as an African/American author who had 15(?) of his 33 titles published by PAN in the 70’s

I have put scans of most of these covers on this page in the order they were originally written. I have not been able to attribute any of the covers to specific artists although one or two I might hazard a guess but I won’t in case I pique ones who I have met. Artists are a sensitive lot and some even deny it’s their work when it has their signature on it!

There is still one PAN edition I’ve failed to track down, namely 0330 247743 “The Treasure of Pleasant Valley” from 1976. I found a couple of sellers claiming to have it but showing the Dell copy. When I asked them to check they both said they had too many titles to do it and then finished by saying “If  we can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us” Now that’s what I call great customer service! I used World Cat and actually found our local library had a copy in their reserved stock. I requested it only to be told “it has gone missing”

I’ve heard from Nay in New Zealand who has a copy of the PAN paper sculpture book “The Railway Children“ with model and instruction sheet plus it is signed by Lionel Jeffries who directed the 1970 film. Shee is looking for around £45 to £50 with postage at about £8. If anyone is interested here email address is nay22.trademe@hotmail.com