After saying the moving of my website to another server so it could be secure seemed to have worked, well I seemed to have spoken too soon. On Tuesday it went down! For four and a half hours I was one of the 5% that my hosting company told me were affected on their clustering Linux servers. Now usually I’m more than happy to be in the minority but not this time although dare I say it, things appear to be back to normal. I am left wondering how clustering servers go down when I thought the idea was you could switch between them if problems occurred?

Back to what we should be talking about and that is PAN Books and in this case those from Grace Metalious. I did look to see if there was any specific date attached to her for now but unfortunately not. The reason I’m including Grace is that I picked up a 1970 edition of ‘Return to Peyton Place’ and looked to see how many variations I had of this and her other three titles published by PAN. The results are HERE and I’m sure there must be others I’ve not got. I also have the original artwork shown but have no idea as to the artist, can anyone help?

Metalious was awarded a posthumous ‘Golden PAN’ for selling over a million copies of ‘Peyton Place’ having died in 1964 at the all too early age of 39. Ian Fleming’s ‘Golden PAN’ was also awarded posthumously.

I’ve now got a copy of ‘Chalkhill Blue’ with the Stuart Bodek cover. The third title in this series ‘Painted Lady’ doesn’t have a Bodek cover. I also found a 1982 Guinness calendar with an example of his work. It includes pictures from other PAN artists like Mike Brownfield and Chris Moore.

..… and finally my wife and I were going to go down to the south coast last week to park the camper on Gordon Young’s drive while I got the rest of his story of his rise from ship’s boy on the ‘Laloun’ to export manager at PAN. Unfortunately, his wife of only 5 months, Chrissie, has gone down with shingles. We wish her a speedy recovery and hope to reschedule when the weathers a bit better in the Spring.