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.

As mentioned previously, when talking about dust jackets, I referred to “The Fountain Of Life” by A G Prys-Jones. I have three versions of this, all dated 1949, but one is the hardback version and two paperback versions. One of the paperback versions is the same size any other PAN paperback, 112mm by 178mm, but the other is what I would call over-sized being 117mm by 182mm and having a dust jacket and a plain cover inside. It was only while showing someone these they said wasn’t the larger paperback the same size as the hardbacks text pages? On measuring them I found they were right so all I can think is that PAN had a lot of the hardback sized pages on which they just put a dust jacket, looking the same as the ‘normal’ paperback version, making a paperback rather than the red cloth hardback.

Fellow Panfan Dave Browining wrote “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 1965 6th printing text block…. with a 1972 Still Life wrap…. so 7 years between print and sale. Don’t suppose you know who at Pan was responsible for these ‘still life’ covers? I really like them, often wonder who the models in the little B/W photographs were”
This made me double check my copy of “The Pan Book Of Card Games” dated 1960 but with an extra page in the back with an address for a website set up in 1996 so this makes 36 years. Can anyone beat that?

As for Dave’s question regarding the Fleming ‘still life’ covers I’ve never found any definitive answer as to who might have been responsible. Some say it was the photographer (who?) others the PAN art director at the time (possibly David Larkin) As for the girls in the photos of this series I often wondered if they were just pictures of celebrities of the time as I’m sure the one on FRWL is Sophia Loren and my wife reckons it’s Twiggy on Goldfinger. Can anyone provide any more information?

Finally while mentioning the ‘still life’ series my 6th printing from 1972 of Octopussy has a bound in tear off card for the Prudential. I’m often finding lose cards for the Prudential, Co-op or Creative Writing courses but this is only the second one I have with it actually attached. Again does anyone know any more?