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’

Brief post today as my computer has finally died and I’m having to borrow one until my new one arrives. What I was going to talk about was the PAN series labelled ‘WESTERN‘ on the spine and having a hat logo on the back. I can’t update the page showing them at the moment so they are all labelled the same but here they are anyway.

A couple of months ago I mentioned the PAN ‘Great Western Novels’ series and managed to find five titles. I have now come across titles as part of PAN’s ‘Best Of American Crime Fiction’ series but so far have only found a few labelled as such from Erle Stanley Gardener, Hillary Waugh, Patricia Highsmith and Charles Williams. Ed McBain and John D MacDonald are also supposed to be part of the series but none of their books that I have state this, they just appear in a list on the back covers of other authors titles.

……. and talking of Gardner has anyone any more with this style of cover or any more in the series? I have found ‘The Case Of The Blonde Bonanza’ and ‘The Case Of The Mischievous Doll’ both listed as having 1975 PAN editions but I’ve not found an image of them.