I recently spotted an edition of ‘The Captain’ by Jan de Hartog which made me look twice. I had the 1969 reprint version with a cover by Paul Wright but this looked different. It is the 1968 edition but why did PAN need to change the cover only a year later and produce two so similar?
1968 1969
Fantastic news – I now have G704 ‘The PAN Junior Crossword Puzzle Book’ which reduces my wants list to 2. So if anyone out there has the ‘Third Junior Crossword Book’ or ‘The Boston Strangler’ but NOT the edition with Tony Curtis on the front please get in touch as I’m sure there is room for negotiation.
While sorting through some of the precariously balanced stacks I came across a 1971 edition of ‘Out Of The Silent Planet’ with an odd PAN logo which I also have on a few Walter Macken titles. It’s the same cover as the 1968 version but with a logo that looks like a stop gap between the old and new style. I was wondering if any one had a later edition where the logo doesn’t look as though some one has done a quick paste job?
I have finished putting together a page of PAN related artwork by John. Although there are 24 in the “Bestsellers of Literature” John only did the 20 show, the other 4 were by Pat Owen. Click on the Artists link above to find the page.
A few weeks ago I mentioned visiting Yorkshire Quality Paperbacks where I bought several books including the 1972 edition of ‘The Feud’ by Amelia Bean. I realised it must be part of a series as I have the original artwork for ‘Warlock’ by Oakley Hall from 1972 in the same style. I then managed to track down another three in the series and paired them up with their older counterparts but does anyone know of any more and does anyone recognise the artist for ‘Warlock’ as it is unsigned?
Click on the picture to see the rest.
I’ve had this artwork for quite a while and all I knew was that it was for a PAN title.
I have now discovered which one so if you want to guess and then check just click on the picture for the answer.
Rob Waterhouse, a fellow PAN Fan from Australia, emailed me to say he had got a copy of ‘A Throne Of Bayonets’ PAN 350 with an slip reporting an error. I have managed to find a copy with this insert and added it to the page but he is fortunate in that his copy also has a slip mentioning Joyce Weiner, Author’s Agent which I find adds greatly to the interest.
This got me onto thinking about bits and pieces I’ve found over the years, mostly adds for life insurance, bus tickets or shopping lists but occasional PAN related bookmarks and other errata slips which I ‘ll blog about at another time. Two good finds were a) hand written and then typed detail plot analysis notes by Marc Brody (Bill Williams) of the novel ‘A Forest Of Eyes’ PAN 248 and b) a copy of the Domino letter in a pristine copy of ‘Thunderball‘ I got for 20p. I see someone is currently asking £750 for one on eBay, funny but there doesn’t seem to be a rush of bidders!
Finally I was going to mention GP17 / X100 but I don’t want to fall foul of the London 2012 Brand Protection ……
As I’m sure every ardent PAN collector knows there was a collaboration between PAN and Harlequin in Canada in the 1950’s I thought there were only eleven titles they jointly published but on looking at the excellent ‘Fly-by-Night’ website I see there is possibly a twelfth but it could be a mistake. It states “There isn’t a Son of the Gods Pan edition. Son of the Gods is also unique in that the phrase “A Harlequin-Pan Book” is not on the front cover and no notice of the arrangement with Pan on the copyright page as there is with the other 11 books. I suspect that the variant of Son of the Gods with the Harlequin-Pan notice on the back cover is an error. The Lost World is 238, Son of the Gods 241. Covers with the preprinted phrase used for The Lost World may have been inadvertently used for Son of the Gods before the error was caught” Just wondering if anyone has a spare copy of this book that I could add to my collection?
While having another look through a DVD of over 500 pieces of original PAN Books cover artwork I noticed something I’d not noticed before. G558, written by Pearl S Buck, was published with the title “The Devil Never Sleeps” but is shown as “The Virgin Of Kwangtung” with the same artwork by Pat Owen. Does anyone know where this alternative title came from as I’ve not managed to track it down so far?
I will be adding further scans from the DVD over the next few months. I’ll list them on the blog to highlight where they are such as this one – The Thirty-Nine Steps
I was just adding the 1970 edition of ‘The Young Lions’ today and cross referencing it with the other editions when I realised PAN had given this title 3 numbers over the years namely X11, M3 and E21. This started me trying to work out which title was published under the most different numbers. So far ‘The Young Lions’ wins but I’m sure there must be others. I’m going to add 1974 edition just for completeness to the series – when I can find it!
I was very pleased to see I was getting a lot of comments until I realised they were all the posting equivalent of spam. If you have sent a comment and its not appeared please send again and start it with something like ‘This is not Spam’ and I can edit the comment to remove it before approving.