I don’t know why but I quite like the ‘An introduction to 50 …..” titles in the PAN Literature Guides series. There are 9 with a fifty reference and a tenth just Shakespeare which slightly spoils it. I think it’s the selection of fonts that just lifts them out of the ‘a bit boring’ category. Click HERE to see them.

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Maurice of Zardoz Books recently put up for sale a copy of ‘So Long and Thanks for All the Fish’ which came from the library of Douglas Adams. It was not just any PAN copy but a book of blank pages with this label inside.

The  price was just within my limits so for nine days I was the winning bidder but six minutes before the auction was up we had to go out and of course it went to someone else who had bigger pockets than me as the final price was just over £156. Just wondering if it was a PAN fan, a Douglas Adams fan or something else?

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I’ve now made a page showing a second title linked to some of the many negatives I have of Sam Peffer and relatives/friends/actors posing for PAN covers. It is G130 ‘Casualty‘ by Robert Romanis. I put some of the Bond negatives I’ve found on a Facebook site and have had several request to use them on websites and in magazines as they have never been seen before. I’ve got three negatives of the four Bond covers Sam painted and if I find the last one I’ll put them all on one page or just the three if I can’t.

As a bonus HERE is a negative for one of Sam’s slightly saucy movie posters. It features Sam’s brother with his own taxi and Sam’s wife, Kitty looking in to it. I checked with Sam’s relatives this was OK and they were quite happy for it to appear. 

Kitty was 97 last Friday so I will wish her a belated ‘Very Happy Birthday”

I’ve always liked stereo viewers and have quite a few and especially the ones from ‘RoMo‘ so I was really pleased to be able to get a red version at a reasonable price. These are usually twice as expensive as the cream version as it is considered ‘rare’ well by the sellers anyway! You may wonder what has this got to do with PAN Books? I was five years ago that I posted this on a blog ;

Robert Gustave Mouzillat Born Suresne 1913 Died Paris 2010

He was founder of La Stereochromie which traded as RoMo, a stereoscopic image company. In 1947 he became a director and participated in the development of publishing company Pan Books. With the support of the board of Pan Books he developed a means of exploiting a new printing technique, combining text with images. This took him into the use of the photographic process in printing. He later formed a company, of which he was the sole owner, to conceive and develop a camera to produce precision three-dimensional photographic images, identical to those recorded by the human eye. The camera, which has itself not been overtaken by modern technology, produced colour positive images.

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Regarding the above I was as pleased to get the packaging as the viewer when I saw the stamps. They were to commemorate ‘Philex France 99′ and featured five images from ‘The Little Prince’ as published by Piccolo in the UK.

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As I mentioned last week I was kindly given hundreds of negatives of people posing as characters to be depicted on  book covers. So far I’ve identified at least a dozen titles that are fairly obvious with hundreds more that require at lot of pondering. I was having problems trying to scan them but have now found by just laying them on a light box and taking a photo it works fine. I’ll try and include a new link each week until I run out or get fed up which ever comes first so here is number one G192 ‘The Spiked Heel’ featuring Kitty Peffer.

Last Monday, Jackie and I paid a visit to Sam Peffer’s relatives, Kathy and Pat, down in Oxfordshire  and I’ll leave Sam to tell you how they are all related in this extract below from his biography.

We were there for several hours constantly plied with tea and sandwiches which were much appreciated. We would have stayed longer but we were due to park up with the camper in a farmers field twenty miles away before 6:00. We are already planning the return visit as there was so much to look through. On leaving Kathy very kindly gave me a bag of negatives for photos that Sam took of mainly relatives but also some actors, posing for characters on covers. It will take a while to go through them all but I’ll put some up now and again if I can work out which was for what cover?
Here they are and the one you can see is very easily identified, can you name that cover?

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I was going to mention Terrance Dicks who passed away at the end of August but I seemed to have missed this as I had already written the blogs knowing that I would be elsewhere. He wrote at least ten titles for the ‘The Baker Street Irregulars’ series but only three were published under the Piccolo imprint. He also co-wrote ‘The Making of Doctor Who’

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Occasionally I look around at the silly prices that sellers are asking for ‘rare’ titles and in this case it was for a copy of ‘You Only Live Twice’ with the film tie-in dust jacket. Looks like I’m nearly two thousand pounds richer if that’s the going rate, mind you it has been there a while …….!

Last Monday I made a return visit to Sue, Hans Helweg’s widow, down in Hay-on-Wye which meant I could have another look around the bookshops whilst returning the material she lent me. Got a couple of Puffin editions of ‘Olga da Polga’ with cover artwork by Hans that are now on his page of children’s titles.
I was amazed to hear Sue had sold all the Hans originals that I had seen last month, envious, me! They went to a book dealer in Gloucestershire and I shall be keeping an eye on his website to see if they appear. Just as I was leaving Sue said she still had one cover that had been overlooked and would I like it? Well it would have been rude of me if I had said ‘No’

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Last week I had an email from Jules Burt with a link to the BBC News website where Glasgow Caledonian University has been donated thousands of photos of Glasgow by Oscar Marzaroli. Jules thought there was one I might be interested in and it was of John Smith’s Book Shop, St Vincent Street, Glasgow, from 1962. Can you see what he saw?

I think there are nine PAN titles propped up and I have identified three easily ‘My Wicked, Wicked Ways‘, ‘Zoo Quest for a Dragon‘ and ‘A Town Like Alice’ which was the 1000th title published by PAN. I am currently trying to identify the others. . The University is raising funds by auctioning off prints and this one had a guide price of £700 to £1,000. It sold for ……..

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On the way back from Hay-on-Wye I stopped of at Berrington Hall to have a look at their secondhand books and the very friendly lady asked if I knew it was NT Book Month? I said that I didn’t and she replied that I could fill a carrier bag for a £1.00 but I said I didn’t have one. She then popped behind the counter and came up with a huge cardboard box and said fill this! Unfortunately, and I know this is hard to believe, I failed as a lot of the books were duplicates we had donated earlier in the year.

Now back from a very enjoyable and event packed few days in Kent with our son and daughter-in-law (and the little one on the way) but sorry to say there is no addition to the section ‘PAN as seen in a NT property’ Knole has 365 rooms but not even a secondhand book shop (it has a new books shop) whereas Quebec House with only 8 rooms at least had secondhand books in the cafe. 

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I contacted Steve Turner recently to update him to confirm the PAN edition of ‘On The Road‘ was by Hans Helweg which he painted in May 1960 and for which he was paid £50.80. As I’ve mention before Steve is hoping to publish a book on Kerouac and the places he visited mentioned in the book. He kindly sent me another photo saying;
“Last year I met up with Al Hinkle who was fictionalised as Ed Dunkel in On the Road. He called himself ‘The Last Man Standing’ as he was the only person still living who was portrayed in the novel. Sadly he died a few months later. He asked me to sign a copy of my Kerouac biography Angelheaded Hipster for him and he in turned signed my Pan paperback of OTR”

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I’ve also heard from Stuart Webb to say he has discovered another ‘Sheldon’ cover since he wrote his article just over a year ago He said:
“I found another Sheldon (Louis Shabner) Pan book cover at the weekend, which I didn’t know was one of his until I spotted the signature, whilst rummaging through a line of Pans in a bookshop. It is ‘Come Back Miranda’ by Anne Duffield (G486, 1961)”

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Finally another moan about booksellers. (when am I not you ask?) which this time is about four titles in the PAN ‘An Introduction to 50 …. ”  series I bought to add to a page as they are examples of what I think should be really unappealing covers but I quite like them. They came with a tracking number which after 15 business days still said ‘Dispatched’ but that was all.  I contacted the seller who told me allow 10 business days from dispatch even though I had said it was already 15 days so I gave it another 5 before contacting again. They came back to say they had duplicate copies and would I like them resent or my money back? I had already checked they had multiple copies of them all, not being uncommon titles, and “Yes” I would like them resent. Now a week later I have just got an email to thank me for requesting a refund which they will now process! I’ll give it a couple of weeks and try again.