Russell Braddon was born January 25th 1921 and although the author of many books he is best remembered for ‘The Naked Island’ which was first published in 1952 by T. Werner Laurie Ltd. The cover was by Ronald Searle who was a prisoner with Braddon in Burma and is probably most well know as the creator of St Trinian’s School. His drawings, used to illustrated Braddon’s book, were in the hardback but not the PAN editions. I have included scans of six different PAN editions but let me know if you have others. I found it interesting to see the references to how many copies have been sold over the years.

“World sales approaching a million copies!”
“Over 850,000 copies sold in PAN alone”
“Almost 1,000,000 copies sold in PAN Books alone”
“Over 1,000,000 copies sold in PAN”
“More than a million copies sold”

Other Braddon titles in PAN are ‘Nancy Wake’ and ‘Nancy Wake’ ‘End Of A Hate’, ‘The Year Of The Angry Rabbit’, ‘The Proud American Boy’ and ‘Committal Chamber’

Every now and again I come across a series of PAN books that should not really be on the site but the Agatha Christie ‘Double Dagger’ covers just appeal to me. They reasons they don’t really fit are 1) a few years later than the remit of the site but this has never stopped me before and 2) they are photos not ‘real’ artwork.

I think it is the quirky and inventive use of the associated objects to form faces although some are better than others. Up to now I have 14 titles but I’m sure someone will let me know if I have missed any?

My personal favourite

For those embracing the new technologies you can scan the QR code below to go to the page on your mobile device. This will probably be the first and last time I use one of these but having now got a phone that reads them ……….!

My website www.tikit.net started 14th years ago today. Back then I was an IT Advisor for an education authority and wrote several programs for children and set up the website to distribute them. I wish I could say I made money but I gave the downloads away 90% of the time. When I realised I was paying for hosting which gave me much more space than I actually needed I decided to share my passion for PAN Books with the world – and it’s been all down hill from then on. I now have several websites and a few redirections so ones like www.panfans.net will also find me.

Google started 1998
PAN Fans started 1999
FriendsReunited started 2000
Wikipedia started 2001
Linkedin started 2002
MySpace started 2003
Facebook started 2004
YouTube started 2005
Twitter started 2006

Having started many different blogging packages (not always successfully) I think WordPress has been the one that I have found easiest to use. I have been blogging with it over the last couple of years but it came as a bit of a surprise to discover that this would be my 100th.

So to celebrate I rushed to complete my present opus which was to get all the Nevil Shute copies of the five main PAN series from 1965 to 1982. I know they are a few earlier titles and some later ones but these are the bulk and coincidently come to exactly 100 as well. I have put place markers just in case there is a cover I’ve missed but I think I’ve been very thorough in my research.

Most of the cover artist for the early series are unknown but I do have a name for the one title in the 1971 series that is just a little different from the others but I reveal that in a later blog.

Finally readers may have noticed that I now have a tendency to show several covers on a page like the Shute’s. This is because I once read a great review of my site which said the only down side was that it was one cover per page and it would have been nice to be able to compare ones from a series. This has always stuck with me. I’m hoping to rectify this so my site will be perfect!

While sorting through some later titles I began to notice how many editions of ‘The Gun’ by C. S. Forester I seem to have on my shelves. As you can see I have found at least 7 different ones albeit some having very subtle differences. The book was made in to the film ‘The Pride and The Passion’ in 1957 

The cover artwork is by David Tayler who lived in Brighton. He did several covers for PAN (more in another blog) but he would take two or three weeks to produce a cover whereas others like Sam Peffer would take two or three days hence Tayler didn’t find it very profitable. I’ve also included an image of the 2001 reprint using the same artwork, I wonder if they acknowledge the source?

PAN was always popular in Canada and Australia with them occasionally bringing out customised titles. I recently came across X730 ‘Night Without Darkness’ by Ken Orvis which had been overprinted for the Canadian market but otherwise is the same as the UK edition being printed in Aylesbury.

The second Canadian connection is that I acquired the checklist produced by Harlequin covering their first 25 tears. I was hoping it would list the titles jointly published by PAN and Harlequin so I could confirm if it was 11. Unfortunately it just lists the numbers and titles without any additional information but it does show ‘The Four Just Men’ on the back cover.

Headdress of Princess Puabi

I recently acquired a glass photographic plate as it said on it ‘PAN Books F466’ I thought the image looked vaguely familiar and thanks to a quick Google images search I had the answer which is that it is the head on the front cover of TP148 ‘The Land Of Shinar‘ by Leonard Cottrell. I presume the image was to to be used in a publication to advertise the book but the photo is not of the PAN edition as you can see there is a description under the headdress and another image to the left.

Gino D’Achille was born in Rome in 1935  and was a prolific book cover artist for numerous publishers including PAN. I will be adding a selection of his covers over the next few weeks but for now I’ve made a page to show all the 10 HART titles by John B Harvey with artwork by Gino. I have been in contact with him via Simona D’Achille who tells me “He remembers painting these covers very well, he had free reign in terms of artistic choices and he retains all publishing rights. He also retains his originals and we are presently working on making prints available soon” Some of the originals can be seen on Gino’s website. Gino now lives in London but unfortunately suffers from Parkinson’s Disease though he is still able to sketch.

As a follow up to the PAN Horror Stories series here is a page of the covers of the PAN Ghost Stories series. As before they are not necessarily the first editions, all having ISDNs, but all earlier editions can be found on the site.