Back in March I mentioned the PAN Books Despatch Centre in West Molesey (1956 to 1961) and that the building is still there, Since then I’ve discovered that it then moved to Edenbriidge (1961 to 1964) before going to Basingstoke. The building in Edenbridge is still there and I hope to call in at the end of the month.
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?
This blog is about a great piece of ephemera namely the original contract between John Burke and Clarence Padget (Director on behalf of PAN) for him to write and for them to publish the book to accompany the film of “The Man Who Finally Died” I’ve added the contract to the page for G614 and also included the original cover artwork by Sam ‘PEFF’ Peffer who signed my copy of the book. Clarence Padget, on Herbert Van Thal’s death, edited the PAN Book Of Horror Stories series from volume twenty-six until its demise with volume thirty in 1989.
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
While sorting through some PAN related bits and pieces I came across the last will and testament of Ralph Holmes Vernon-Hunt (as you do) in which he leaves all to his wife or in the event of his wife predeceasing him, his children. Included with this was the letter to the right on PAN Books headed notepaper because at the time he was Sales Director who later became the Managing Director but he is more famous for another reason.
He was the model for the James Bond found on the covers of several titles from the early 1960’s. He even appears on one cover when he shouldn’t! Click here to find out which one has the mistake.
Ralph Holmes Vernon-Hunt May 23rd 1923 > Nov 10th 1987
Sales Director PAN Books 1947 > 1962 & 1969 > 1982
Nephew of Alan John Bott > Founder of PAN Books
Finally I was out walking a long distance footpath over the last couple of days some of which included the towpath of the Staffs and Worcs Canal. One of the moored narrow boats had a couple of boxes of paperbacks by it. They were 10p each and in one was, at a quick look, a complete set of James Bond PANs from the 60’s. I was very tempted but as I was only 15 miles into the 41 I had to cover I regrettably decided not to this time which was probably a sensible decision.
Bazeer Flumore sent me the following photographs after he visited a bookfair in Clunes, Australia. Clunes has just become the first Australia booktown so I hope if does better than Atherstone booktown here in the UK which seems to be no more. Bazeer runs the excellent Piz Gloria website for those aficionados of James Bond book covers and while he was looking to enlarge his collection he was also looking for my last three wants but I think failed on both counts.
Here are a few photos of what we missed including a few of those boxes we love to look through hoping to find that one title the dealer missed but ……….
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.
Alan Bott was a WW1 flying ace and was shot down in Turkey. This scene is represented in a painting “The Bott Incident” by Stuart Reid in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.
He also wrote about this experience and his subsequent escape from a POW camp in the book ‘Easter Nights and Flight’ which was originally published in 4 parts in the Harpers magazine from August 1919. It was also republished by Penguin in 1941. He escaped with a fellow prisoner who also wrote about this incident in his book ‘Guests Of The Unspeakable’ by T W White.
I shall be updating the Alan Bott pages on the site shortly and will have a lot more details about this and other aspects of his life.
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.
I’m often asked about dust jackets or dust wrappers on the early PANs. Sometimes these were put on as a film tie in such as 48, or to make a dull cover more attractive on the shelf or, and I may be accused of being cynical, a crafty way of upping the price. I have several that are still 1/6 inside but 2/0 on the dustjacket. These are the PANs I have that have jackets 24, 27, 29, 36, 40, 44, 48, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 88, 90 and 138. Unusually I have two different dust jackets for 90 and disappointingly the cover and dust jacket of 138 are identical! Later PANs with dust jackets include X432 and E5 both as film tie-ins. PAN 194 seems to have a dust jacket but I’ll have another blog on that soon.
I was very pleased to get number 68 ‘Late and Soon’ in mint condition as I found it in a secondhand book shop where it appeared to be chaos but the owner knew exactly what he had got. It was not priced but I knew if I gave it to him on its own he notice and put on a hefty price so I ended up buying several from the 10p each shelves and putting 68 near to bottom. Luckily he just looked at the first few, decided they were all 10p and I got out of there very fast!
If you have any that aren’t included please let me, I just looked along the shelf so I may have missed some as well.