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.

After reading the excellent article “The Nightmare Painters” relating to PAN Horror Books by Johnny Mains in issue 4 of the ‘Illustrators’ Magazine (I’m giving it a plug as it’s gave me one in issue 1 and it’s also a really good magazine) ) I realised how few titles I had actually got. On looking on eBay I found a complete set at 99p but with the dreaded words ‘collection only’ which I usually avoid but then realised the post code was for a road just 2 miles away. In went the bid and although they were just a little more than 99p I picked them up the next day and the majority are in very good condition. I’ve scanned them all in and put them on one page as there are not many sites that show them all at the same time. The dates are for the actual dates in the books so not all first.
To complement the Horror books I’ll make a page for the Ghost books as I think I have them all so watch this space.

Phyllis Whitney 1903 to 2008

Still finding bits and pieces of artwork and managing to identify the title. This week it has been ‘Silverhill’ (1967)  by Phyllis Whitney. Although PAN published several titles by her I’ve only found one other example using the same style of cover ‘Snowfire’ (1973) She also wrote ‘Spindrift’ in 1975 which would seem to tie in with the others but is a completely different style.
What I would like to know is who painted the original cover? I’d suggest Michael Johnson but is it good enough for him?

While sorting out some artwork I came across the original covers for “The Young Mary” and “The Young Elizabeth” both by Jean Plaidy and published by Piccolo in 1972. There was a third title “Meg Roper” but this was not published by Piccolo and I wondered why? On investigation I found that the first two titles had been used by Macdonald Roy for their series “The Young  ……” and as well as including Mary and Elizabeth they also featured John Milton, the Brontes, Charles Dickens,  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alexander the Great , James Barrie, Marie Curie, Sir Francis Drake, Thomas Edison, Louis Braille, Helen Keller and others.

I have not discovered who painted the covers for the two Piccolo Plaidy titles but the inside illustrations are the ones that Macdonald Roy used in their 1968/69 editions and are by William Randel.

Now I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned here how a few years back crime fighting superhero ‘PAN MAN’ managed to thwart a dastardly crime which enabled the recovery of stolen artwork for many original PAN covers but if not I’ll tell you all about how I did it another time.

One outcome of this was that I received a DVD with scans of the artwork to over 500 original PAN covers. I was hoping for the artwork but it was not to be, honesty overcame avarice.
I have been looking at it again and will include in future blogs some more examples of covers not used such as the Sax one for “Sorrell and Son”, covers with subtle changes like G375 “Claudelle” and some of the examples of how the artwork developed for example number 14 “The Thirty-Nine Steps”

It was one of those strange coincidences that I mentioned ‘Bestsellers of Literature’ last week, 20 of the 24 covers being painted by John Raynes, when I got an email from the man himself. John had been contacted by one of the boys who had modelled for the cover of ‘Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn’ asking if he still had a copy of the cover which he didn’t. I helped out by forwarding a scan of my copy but in return I have the names of the two boys and where the painting was done.

It was in 1968 that John took Tim Wilcocks and Simon Games-Thomas to Stogumber Church in Somerset where he photographed them. Tim was the one standing and played Tom while the one sitting was Simon as Huck. They were both 15 years old and pupils at Taunton Prep School.

Having bitten the bullet I am now the proud owner of an ‘all singing all dancing’ computer running Windows 8 which I have to confess I quite like having progressed from DOS through Windows 3.0, 3.1 (and variants),’95, ’98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista but skipping Windows 7 and I think it turns out to be better than I was lead to believe.

But I digress as the big story of the week is thanks to Tom O’Toole in Harwich who saw my wants list and emailed to say he had a copy of E13 ‘The Boston Strangler’ and that I could have it! This means I am now down to one known remaining title (there may be more that I’ve not discovered yet)  and that is X705 ‘PAN Junior Crosswords Book 3’