PAN was always popular in Canada and Australia with them occasionally bringing out customised titles. I recently came across X730 ‘Night Without Darkness’ by Ken Orvis which had been overprinted for the Canadian market but otherwise is the same as the UK edition being printed in Aylesbury.

The second Canadian connection is that I acquired the checklist produced by Harlequin covering their first 25 tears. I was hoping it would list the titles jointly published by PAN and Harlequin so I could confirm if it was 11. Unfortunately it just lists the numbers and titles without any additional information but it does show ‘The Four Just Men’ on the back cover.

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.