I’ve mentioned Martin Baker’s covers for Fontana Agatha Christie titles before, well now they have appeared in an article by David Morris on his excellent ‘Collecting Christie’ website. He includes a very interesting interview with Martin which gives a lot of background to the ‘foxtail’ series. When asked, I was more than happy for David to use the scans off my page as it includes a plug for the site. It also shows I do go off at a tangent away from PAN very occasionally if I like the artwork. I heard from Martin to say he is not happy that other publishers use his artwork without permission such as there two on the right, one of which is a Bosnian version of “Cat Among the Pigeons” while the other is more a possible pastiche on an Italian edition of ‘Macabro Quiz’
A couple of titles I have on my shelves are ‘Beyond the Void’ and ‘Dreaming of Utopia’ both by Steve Holland of Bear Alley Books and well worth a read. They both contain examples of PAN book covers with ‘Utopia’ featuring four by Reina Mary Sington and ‘Void’ also has four but by Henry Fox.
In Penguin Collector 102 Peter Miller states in his article that there are ‘Too Few Murders in Penguin’ pointing out how some prolific crime writers were well served by other publishers but not by Penguin. One example was Arthur Upfield where PAN published and reprinted many more of his titles than did Penguin. Peter has managed to include the cover of PAN 441 ‘Cake in a Hat Box’ by Rex Archer but he said space precluded more.