Only a couple of items this week as having been in The Netherlands I’m just adding this at the last minute. Nothing to do with books but if you are in The Netherlands I can highly recommend a ride of the Stoomtram.

I recently noticed that PAN/Piccolo/Piper seemed to have published several editions of the Walter Macken title ‘Flight of the Doves’ made into a film in 1971. The Piccolo 1971 edition features the same artwork by Brian Bysouth as the DVD cover, film poster and LP cover. There is no mention of Brian Bysouth in the book but I did find he put a lot of his posters into an auction last year including this one.

PAN published two editions for the film with similar screen shot covers in 1971 but one has SP on it which stands for Scholastic Publications. In every respect, apart from the cover, they are almost identical although the SP one only has a price of 20p on the back whereas the other has several for different countries. Scholastic was a company that sent catalogues of books to schools for children to chose reasonably priced editions similar to adult book clubs. I was teaching at this time and remember this was the bane of my life, I couldn’t never get the money to balance and often had to make it up myself but on the plus side teachers got complimentary copies which were supposed to go on the classroom shelves but mine came home and I still have one or two.

Now I know it must be difficult to come up with new ideas for covers but the PAN cover for ‘Gold Mine’ from 1970 looks very similar to the PANTHER cover for ‘Pit’ from 1969 but as they both have a mining/death theme it might be just coincidence?