I like UK movie press books where they show the PAN title and in this case it was for the 1966 American comedy film ‘Penelope’ directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Natalie Wood, Ian Bannen, Peter Falk, Jonathan Winters, and Dick Shawn. The screenplay was by George Wells’ based on the 1965 novel of the same title and written by Howard Melvin Fast under the pseudonym E.V. Cunningham. I’ve included a couple of versions of the film posters as I was intrigue to see how the hand of the man on the right moves. I was also surprised to notice the very small GS on the cover of the book as I thought it was just a film tie-in but Glenn Steward must have had a hand in the design.
PAN published several books by the late Clive James under their Picador imprint. Most are softbacks but a few are hardbacks of which I have a couple of examples one of which says it’s a Picador Poetry volume which is a first to me. I was pleased to find it contained a letter from Clive James but I had to investigate one of the items mentioned at the end of it. For information to those not in the antipodes a Polly Waffle was an Australian chocolate bar that was manufactured in Sydney by Nestlé. It consisted of a waffle wafer tube filled with marshmallow and coated in chocolate. It ceased to be manufactured in 2009 apparently. Wagon Wheels are a biscuit base with marshmallow on top covered in chocolate. My favorite is the ‘jammie’ one which has raspberry flavoured apple jam and I list it as ‘one of my five a day’
Having mentioned the ‘ripped off’ Christie covers last week I started to look for more PAN titles and found ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’ retiltled “Vụ Án Mạng Ở Vùng Mesopotamia” in Vietnamese using the original SAX artwork. I have also found ‘Poirot Investigates‘ and a few others but the only images I have so far are thumbnails so I’ll try and keep search for proper ones for a later blog.
