I was sorry to hear of the death of Desmond Digby last week in Australia. He was on my list of ‘to contact’ book artists probably best known for illustrating the ‘Bottersnikes and Gumbles’ series by Sidney A Wakefield. I will put a page together to show the Piccolo editions in a later blog.

There was an advert for our local brew, Bank’s Beer, which said ‘Unspoilt By Progress’ and I’m pleased to say that applies to my PAN website. Because it doesn’t use anything fancy it passes the Google mobile friendly test, unlike my other two, as it is the same as it was in 1999. Back then it was at the cutting edge of technology using frames and a screen resolution of 800×600 when the standard was 640×480. I seem to remember having the amazing amount of hosting space of 10gb(!) so every image counted hence the small size of the oldest ones.

Just sorting books on the shelves and I started to realise how many copies of Arthur C Clarke titles I have. I’ll be putting together a few pages of them over the next months and todays is “Childhood’s End” written in August 1953. Still looking to identify some of the artists. Why couldn’t PAN be more like US publishers and acknowledge them which is why I’ve included the Ballantine as it lists Dean Ellis as the cover artist.

On a completely different note my son thinks my wife and I need to get out more so he is signing us up for interesting experiences such as aerial walkways, Segway riding, tobogganing and last Monday sky diving in a wind tunnel. I don’t think I was quite a supple as I needed to be. This was about as high as I got where as my wife and son went up over twenty feet! 

I was again looking through some old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and being amazed at how many familiar names did the illustrations. So for this blog I have scanned in a few pages of illustrations by artists who also did covers for PAN. To make it a quiz I’ve given the title but not the artist. Click HERE to go to the page where you will find a random selection of seven images by seven artist some of who are very well know.

When you have had enough click HERE for the answers.

UPDATE I have added another 3 titles to the Cartland page which now brings the number scanned to 105 and making the total of know PAN titles 133(?) as one was a title I hadn’t got on the original list. This meant a complete rejig of the table as 132 was neatly divided by 4 but 133 …!

Following on from the blog referring to the PAN “Spotlight on Languages” series they also carried on the “Breakthrough Languages” series first published by Macmillan, then taken over by PAN and eventually going back to Macmillan. They were sold as a package containing a book and originally cassettes, later replaced with CD’s and the page shows two covers for some of the languages, I’m still trying to find the missing few, and I’m just guessing that the covers by Rowan Barnes-Murphy are later as the contents are identical.

If the name Rowan Barnes-Murphy sound familiar it’s because he did several covers for Piccolo and is still extremely active today as can be seen on his website 

Dear Tim, My apologies for not getting back to you sooner and would have been very happy to have met you on your last visit to this area but I recall things were very hectic at the time ….renovating a small cottage whilst living in it and working at the same time. Very demanding. I’ll have a look around and see what books I’ve got.  I usually keep copies of everything I’ve done. I’ll get some scans over to you.  This will take a little while as I’m again very occupied with work at present. I met Val Biro and his wonderful car at a school once where he was story telling and I was the ‘drawer’. He was charming and great company for the day.
Love your website by the way!
Brilliant!
I’ll be in touch.
Best wishes
Rowan

I’m trying to track down a couple of the covers Rowan mentioned that I’ve not seen but here are the six covers he did for “The Cryptic Library”

As it was my birthday last Friday and a hotel chain was doing a “too good to miss” offer for the weekend we decided to be tourists in Birmingham even though it is only 10 miles away. The hotel couldn’t have been better placed, right in the city centre and we had a list of things to see with top of the list being the new Library of Birmingham, just a 10 minute walk away. On the way to visit the Sea Life Centre we watched a barge breaking the ice and which coincidently was named “Aquarius” my star sign. Then to the new library followed by a visit to the Willard Wigan amazing miniatures exhibition on the 3rd floor and we were lucky enough to meet him and shake his hand. I didn’t realise he comes from a couple of miles away from where we live. At the library I was really impressed to see that they had kept the Shakespeare Memorial Room from 1882 and rebuilt it in the rotunda on the 9th floor. We finished the day seeing the new exhibition at the museum displaying “The Staffordshire Hoard” where we stayed so long we actually got locked in! Finally had a brush with the law as met up with our daughter, a police officer, who was on duty in the city centre that evening. She looks too small to be driving a large police car but it was a brief meet as a call came in, the blue lights came on ……. and off she went.

The only real second hand book shop in the city centre “Readers World“ (video shows shop eventually) was closed when we got there as we’d left it a bit late but as I’d been there recently I wasn’t too bothered. Back to books proper next week.

Just acquired an unread boxed set of the five titles in the ‘Hitch Hikers Guide’ trilogy which have facsimiles of the original covers. These were published in 2002 by TOR Books which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of PAN Books. They have used the 79, 80, 82, 84 and 92 covers but as someone put on Amazon in their review “Bought this as a gift for someone. They were desperately disappointed, with the paperback cover images. They are so obviously a fake. It looks as if the person who created the cover images could not be bothered to do a decent job in scanning the original paperback covers. However, the content of the books. Brilliant. But why would you wish to buy a box set of the original paperback editions? To have the originals, or a very good copy of them. And this is a very poor copy of them” with which I have to agree.

They are all labelled ‘Commemorative Edition” which I took to mean commemorating a year since his passing but on checking it is actually 11 months! Any other suggestions?

Douglas Adams received ‘Golden PAN’ awards for the first three HHG titles.

Something most unexpected has happened. A ‘new’ second-hand bookshop, Southcart Books, has opened in our local town! I paid a visit and was really pleased to find four Ted Willis titles (the ones with the yellow name flash) in the ‘free to a good home’ box. I have found a few more PAN covers and put them on this page. There was an excellent selection of paperbacks but mostly a little newer than my date range but it won’t stop me visiting.

Ted Willis was a prolific writer not only of books but film and TV scripts and is probably most well know for his character ‘Dixon of Dock Green’

Passing a pile of books outside a shop I noticed one was a PAN and surprisingly it credited the cover artist but not someone I’d heard of. Having now looked him up the only reference I can find is on “The Illustrated Gallery” website where they say

“Although a popular fantasy artist in the 1990s, almost nothing is known about David Bergen’s career. He was active in the 1970s, illustrating Sphere’s H. G. Wells’ reprints and the cover for SF Digest (1976), as well as books by Arthur C. Clarke and Samuel R. Delaney. Soon after, he could be found contributing covers to DAW Books in the USA. Bergen then seemed to disappear until 1990 when his work began appearing on various Pan fantasy and SF titles as well as the Puffin editions of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series. He continued to produce covers until at least 1997 when his work again disappears from sight”

The cover I found was from 1980 so it looks like he was working for PAN earlier than 1990 but the challenge now is to see if I can contact him and find other examples of his work.
* UPDATE I think I’ve tracked him down to The Netherlands and an email has been sent, watch this space.

Every year I’m tempted to go to the Hay-On-Wye Literary Festival that ends tomorrow but then I think of the sort of person that does go and decide it’s not really for me. I’m not ‘yuppie’ enough to have a pair of green wellies, a Burberry jacket and children called ‘Jocasta’ and ‘Orlando’ I’ll just make do with sharing a couple of images that I quite like (although I hope no books were harmed in the making of the circle!)