Thanks to Kathy emailing me bits and pieces as she finds them I’m adding to pages as I go along. I mentioned I’m making a list of Sam Peffer’s photos and the covers I think they go with which will be a long term project so pop back now and again to see the updates. A couple of pages I’ve updated are ‘Sinners and Shrouds‘ where Kathy sent me the photo used for the finished pose and another cover, Panther not PAN, showing Sam’s boots used on the cover of the ‘The Cretan Runner
After making contact with the buyer of the 70 plus original artworks by Hans Helweg I bought a couple of the more obscure ones as they were within my price range. They were the two Morton Thompson titles PAN published in 1969 and although Alysoun at PAN tells me there were 25,000 copies of ‘Not As A Stranger’ printed that year I am having to make do with a scan of the printers proof as I can’t find a copy anywhere, anyone got one? I do have a copy of ‘The Cry and the Covenant’ but I need one in better condition. Now if I want a copy of ‘Not As A Stranger’ from 1959 listed as M1 there seems to be dozens probably because it went through so many printings with the same cover surprisingly also by Hans Helweg. The list I have that Hans complied of his covers seems to skip 1969 but around that time he was being paid £58.16 a cover.
As has been mention several times Colin Larkin of pop music books fame has been writing one covering the artists and artwork of the first 25 years of PAN Books. Due to several unforeseen circumstances it is only now finished and should be going off to the publisher this month for release in the New Year. Colin sent me a very brief but full of feeling email saying “It’s frickin’ finished — after 30 bleedin’ years — its finished” which sounds like the words of a very happy man. The final piece was trying to find a copy of the photo of Sam Peffer posing as the figure on the front of ‘The One-Eyed Witness’ The only one on several sites was the one I had had on mine and was much too small to be used in a publication. Unfortunately in my ‘Great Computer Crash of 2104’ I lost all the originals but once again Kathy came to the rescue and found an image we could use (everything is now backup in triplicate) Annoyingly I can’t find my copy of the book to rescan that was signed by PEFF and says he’s the model hence the one on the page is enlarged poorly!