“I don’t believe it!” I was going to mention this last Monday but the eBay auction was still in progress for a 1956 copy of ‘Moonraker’ with the Josh Kirby cover. It was the price it went for that was so astounding – £254 from 38 bids! This means I must have over £750 worth of 1956 ‘Moonraker’s sitting on my shelves. If only that was true I could be making a very nice profit as I know my best copy cost me all of 20p in a second-hand bookshop in Bridgnorth, Shropshire.

Looking on AbeBooks I can see a couple of copies described as G or VG for around £70 and even with postage from Canada or New Zealand they are considerably cheaper whilst Amazon has a G copy for £50. This is not one of my favourite covers and I don’t really like PEFF’s from 1959 either but that’s just my opinion. There are a couple coming up on eBay in a few days so it will be interesting to see if they reach anywhere near the dizzy heights of last Monday, I’ll add the final prices here next week.

15/05/14 First auction finished at £139.13 with 19 bids. Next to end is currently at £74.50 with 0 bids(!) and there is now a third one at £5.50 with 10 bids.

17/05/14 The second ended with no bidders possibly because it is in Alaska and the third is currently at £103.13 with 26 bids.

18/05/14 The third one attracted 33 bids and went for £162

Talking of prices I’m often asked “Are PANs worth much?’ to which I usually reply ‘They are worth what someone will pay for them” but if you are looking for a cheap supply try here.

I came across the Piccolo edition of “The Three Musketeers” and was impressed with the distinctive artwork for the cover. It didn’t take long to find that it was the work of Tom Barling and that there were another seven titles in the Adventure Series. Tom Barling was also an author of several books and wanted to retell the stories for this series himself but looking at the authors I find he only did two. Three were rewritten by Alan Robertshaw, a retired headteacher and author of several books in his own right details of which can be found on his website here. I managed to contact Alan in France and he sent me the following information which could explain why only two titles were rewritten by Tom. I also found an article in ‘The Times’ for 5th November 1977 saying very much the same.

Alan Robertshaw

“Tom Barling and I never met, though in an odd way it was thanks to him that I got involved with the project. Edward Blishen, who was by way of being a friend as well as a former tutor (he taught a “Children in Literature” course for the late, great Harry Rée, Prof of education at the (then) new University of York)  had been kind enough to look at some children’s fiction I was writing in the early 1970’s, and knew I was keen to try my hand at more. When Pan asked him to edit the Adventure Library he commissioned Tom Barling to illustrate the series, and evidently Tom wished to write one as well. It seems that the writing was perhaps not quite up the the very high standard of his comic-book style illustrations, so Edward found himself with a 20,000-word version of one of the books (it was either Last of the Mohicans or King Solomon’s Mines – I forget which) that he couldn’t use, tied very closely to illustrations that he certainly could use. So he kindly asked me to have a stab at the text, being sure to include the captions of Tom’s illustrations in my text. Quite a tall order, especially as, at that point, I had not even read either book!

I was both surprised and delighted that Edward was not only very happy with the result, but also promptly commissioned two more books. I seem to remember that the Yorkshire Post latched onto the series and I had a rather dour conversation with a reporter, who really wanted me to say that I was rather ashamed at having reduced classics of English Literature to comic-book status! Needless to say I gave him short shrift. The series was, I thought, ground-breaking and excellent.

A codicil: The last book I attempted was A Tale of Two Cities, which I found immeasurably harder than the other two – simply because Dickens was much, much more than a simple story-teller. Reducing him to 20,000 words was an object lesson in the great craft of his writing.”

I’ve been after a 2nd edition copy of ‘The Speed System of Basic Mathematics’ Piper MP86 1968 for a while but every time it appeared infrequently on eBay someone always outbid me. I’ve now managed to get it from a seller on Amazon but I have to say it must be one of the most boring covers around and on looking at other Pipers from that time there are several more just as dull. My selection appears below and if there are any you want to nominate we’ll have a poll for the worst!. The first edition of the Trachtenberg was not amongst my favourite covers but it was more adventurous than these.

In the last blog I queried if the monogram that looked as if it was made up of a G, d and an A was Gino d’Achille? Having looked at his website more closely I found an example picture which clearly shows it is his although he often just put GD.

You wait for months for one and then two come along at once. I managed to get hold of 7th Piccolo Crosswords Book last week and this week the 4th. So next week it will be number 11 and then number 12 – if only!

I recently picked up a copy of “Young Claudia” number 528 in the DELL Mapbacks series which looks as though it has never been read. It was the cover which caught my attention as it is certainly more eye catching than the covers from PAN. I sorted out the other titles published by PAN, rescanned them and put them on a page along with the DELL cover. I’m left wondering why PAN only published 7 of the 9 titles in the series. Number 8 was ‘The Antic Years’ and number 9 was ‘Return Of Claudia’ There were a couple of other titles but these were omnibus editions.

Going back a few blogs where I mentioned recycled artwork, I heard from Uilke in The Netherlands who pointed me in the direction of another one ( his site is well worth visiting for his extensive collection of paperback covers) It is from Ullstein Bucher and is Hodder not PAN related this time. You’ll noticed it has been flipped as the signature is backwards.

In 1971 PAN brought out a set of six ‘mini books’ (approximately 5″ x 5″) written by the ‘Peter Pan’ of cooks Robert Carrier. The six books gave suggestions for suppers, luncheons, barbecues, breakfasts/brunches, dinners and children’s parties. I have often seen individual titles for sale but I’ve only just acquired the set in a slip case. Click on the picture of Robert Carrier to go to his page.

Sorry for another short posting but my iritis has returned after an absence of twenty years so the world is currently a haze while I have to keep putting drops in my eyes.