I recently picked up a rebound copy of the PAN 1956 edition of ‘Seven Years in Tibet‘ by Heirich Harrer which caught my eye as it wasn’t the usual amateur job such as BYO (Bind Your Own) but a professional looking one. It has a sticker inside saying it was rebound as a hardback in Hong Kong. PAN released four different editions between 1956 and 1974 and not always with more attractive covers especially not the 1974 edition!

This weeks drawings by Hans Helweg are for ‘Immortal Queen’ by Elizabeth Byrd. Wikipedia says ‘Elizabeth Byrd (December 8, 1912 – May 11, 1989) was an American author. Her main body of work is historical fiction, and her most successful novel is Immortal Queen, a historical romance about Mary, Queen of Scots. Nine of her thirteen novels were published while she was living in Scotland” PAN published seven of her titles.

I was once told it cost a lot of money to produce books with things like the bullet holes or film sprocket holes for James Bond titles or the shape of a tombstone for the Grave Humour titles so I was surprised to find ‘The Dinosaur Joke Book’ was not a straightforward shape with the top rounded off.

Is there some reason that the few copies of ‘And Now The Screaming Starts’ by David Case from 1973 that I’ve found appear to be a) expensive and b) in awful condition or is it just me? This was originally published as ‘Fengriffen‘ but not by PAN. This is my copy which has been much improved(!) in PhotoShop.

This weeks Hans Helweg’s sketches and maquettes are for ‘Travels With Charley‘ by John Steinbeck. I’ve included later copies with artwork by John Walsh and Brian Sanders. Annoyingly, after much hunting, I cannot find my copy by Brian so have not been able to include a decent scan. I thought I had found another copy on a French site and on checking was told it was, as stated in the description, with a cover by Brian so why when it arrived was it the one with a cover by Walsh? How hard can it be to get this right and it now involves me sending it back, I’m wondering if it will be as easy now with customs etc. we have left the EU. As I have said many times I did NOT vote to leave.

This might be just me but I’ve only just noticed the logo for the Fontana children’s imprint ‘Fanfare’  next to the one for PAN’s ‘Piccolo’ have a similar musical theme. As I said it might just be me ……..! I’ve tried to find out which came first and so far ‘Piccolo’ wins as they started in 1971 while the earliest titles I’ve found from ‘Fanfare’ are dated 1972, a couple of  ‘Tamworth Pig’ stories by Gene Kemp.

It nice to keep in touch with artists and in this case it’s Cecil Vieweg. I recently came across his original artwork for one of the 32 cards inserted into packs of cigars. There is a very fetching photo of Cecil on the back of the folder with him holding another of the cards. I have added the artwork and the card (although not PAN) to the bottom of his page. Cecil has also promised me a CD of some of his preliminary sketches so looking forward to that arrive soon.

For a long time I’ve tried to track down Pat Owen once resorting to ringing all the P Owens along the south coast without success but I did have some interesting conversations! . Fortunately Kathy Ford, Sam Peffer’s great niece, pointed me in the right direction and if I had known his first name was actually Cyril I’d have found him much sooner. Unfortunately Pat passed away on the 26th May 2017 but I am in contact with Sue, his widow, who sent me an a article that appeared on the news letter of the ‘Guild of Aviation Artist’ of which Pat was a member. I hope they don’t mind me including it here. I need to sort out a page for him and will put one on the site ASAP but in the meantime HERE is the link to an article featuring Pat and Sam which I put on the site quite a while ago with kind permission of Steve Chibnall.

As I have mentioned previously David Larkin passed away last year. His brother Colin wrote an obituary for the Macmillan newsletter which I am now allowed to include here as it has now been published. Thanks to Colin for letting me have a copy. Click HERE to view as a PDF

I’m always on the look out for more variants of Jack Higgin’s covers and spotted these two on an Indian website where they were shown as ‘SOLD’ I’ve not see either before as ‘A Season in Hell’  usually has a blue background) and ‘Confessional’ is a new one altogether. Just wondering if anyone has got either so I can get a good quality scan and publication date?

Always a pleasant surprise to find a book that you get for a few pence turns out to be signed as in this case one by Penelope Lively.

While going through Hans Helweg’s drawings one that jumped out was for ‘Immortal Queen’ by Elizabeth Byrd. I have included two but I’m not sure if one is for the same book or if it reminds me of another cover I’ve not recalled it yet. Sarah Elizabeth Evelyn Byrd was born on December 8th 1912  in St. Louis, Missouri and died on May 11th 1989 in Tucson, Arizona. She had many jobs in broadcasting and journalism before moving to Aberdeen, Scotland. She wrote 13 books altogether of which PAN published 7.

FOOTNOTE: I bought a book from Antikvárium in Hungary and after a couple of weeks received an email to say due to the rising levels of COVID in the UK and to protect their workers they were no longer posting to here. I emailed back to say “Sorry, what?” but no reply. Am I missing something?

UPDATE As I was having problems with the default ‘comments’ option I have added in ‘wpDiscuz’ which appears to be working and all previous comments are now showing. This uses the existing ‘comments’ button but has a squillion more options so it will be a work in progress while I fine tune it. Reasonably happy with it so far apart from everyone seems to get the PAN Avatar!

Three blogs ago I posted a ‘rough’ of a cover by Hans Helweg and asked if anyone recognised it? Well I very pleased to say Tony Whitehorn emailed; “On your 28 Dec blog you showed a rough of a Helweg cover and asked if anyone could identify which book it was for. In case no one else has done so yet, I can tell you, because I wrote the blurbs for it and still have the cover, though not the book. It was for ‘TO LIVE IN DANGER’ by Bryan Magee (Pan X184), which I remember as being a good thriller” Tony was featured in another blog HERE

I have been collecting up the Piccolo books I have called ‘FLASH’ titles as they have one across the cover. They are mainly jokes, riddles, limericks, poems and ‘funny’ newspaper cuttings and can be seen HERE. There are several other titles in the same genre but without the ‘flash’ and I’ve added a couple on the page. There are a few more titles I will add if I come across them but they are not that high on my priority list!

I was really pleased to find some preliminary sketches from Hans Helweg for his Wiibur Smith covers. I’ve added them to the page I made for him and his ‘Golden Pan Award’ I also found three photographs of Smith in his study that I added at the bottom and if you look carefully you can just about see the award on his desk.

Denys Parsons collected together items from papers of mistakes, misquotes and double entendres. He was the grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. and originally worked in the field of scientific research and invention. He then became a film-maker and finally ended up as the Press Officer for the British Library. Click HERE to see the his PAN/Piccolo titles.

PAN published four of the thirty two ‘Miss Silver’ titles by Patricia Wentworth including ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’ from 1953 with artwork by Sax (Rudolph Michael Sachs) Hodder reused it for their 2007 edition of the same title but did not really do it justice. The other titles are ‘Miss Silver Comes to Stay’, ‘The Clock Strikes Twelve’ and ‘Grey Mask’

This week is the last of the Hans Helweg artworks I got back in October but I do have a lot more of his sketches for covers that I will add if I can identify them. The artwork is for ‘Belle Catherine’ by Juliette Benzoni from 1968 for which Hans got paid £58.16. He is also painted the cover for ‘Catherine and Arnaud’ as in this photo I took in his studio. I’m not sure who painted the later edition of ‘Belle Catherine’ but it looks like it could be John Raynes?

Having acquired, over the years, several boxed sets containing different numbers of titles from the ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ I was pleased to find the above on a site in the States as I didn’t have one with just the first three titles. I’m not sure of the exact date of publishing although it will be ’42’ years in 2021 since PAN first published book one on the 12th October 1979.

Another boxed set but with a different subject this time, namely cooking and it contains three titles in the ‘A Taste of England’ series of recipe books. They appear to be the standard UK PAN editions but put in a slip case for an American company ‘LANDS’ END DIRECT MERCHANTS, INC’ with a trade mark registered in 1984.

This weeks artwork by Hans Helweg is ‘Death Is Our Playmate’ by Patrick Turnbull. I also found a few preliminary sketches by Hans to go with it. I found a photo of Patrick in ‘Argosy’ magazine plus just a few details of his life. Patrick Edward Xenophon Turnbull was born on 17 March 1908 in Barberton, Mpumalanga, South Africa, his father, Hugh, was 28 and his mother, Ethel, was 28. He spent many years in the army off and on and was married four times and had three children. He died on 23 March 1986 in Chilton, Oxfordshire at the age of 78.

I hope you all managed to have a sort of festive time in spite of the current restrictions and got a lot of the presents you were expecting? I recently couldn’t resist 36 small artworks by Glenn Steward to go with two ‘Camberwick Green’ titles and thanks to my wife being the generous lady she is, she bought me 40 custom made frames as my Christmas present. They needed to be made to measure as there was nothing their size readily available. I have to admit they  do look good and replaced several frames of postcards of pulp covers with dubious images maybe not suitable for our Grandson to ask about if he is ever allowed to come up here! Glenn Steward did many covers for PAN of which I have a few but don’t really know much about him so if any relatives are out there I’d love to add at least one photo of him.

Now going through the folders of sketches from Hans Helweg and there are some real ‘crackers’ to use a festive metaphor. I’ll be adding them to the book covers and artwork if I have it and put up a link on here to make it easier to find. There are also some that look familiar but just can’t quite bring it to mind such as this example. Can any one help?

One disappointment was the supposedly six book boxed set of PAN Books Sherlock Holmes titles I found online in the States. The webpage said it was this, when it arrived the label on the package said it was this as did the invoice so how come it was just one hardback copy of ‘Memoirs’ from Reader’s Digest, no connection to PAN at all? I should have know as fellow PAN Fan Stuart Radmore emailed to say he didn’t think PAN published ‘Casebook’ or ‘Memoirs’ as did Alysoun at PAN but we held out the hope that they might be Canadian editions but unfortunately not. On the plus side Stuart gave me the names of all artists for the covers PAN did publish plus I did get my money back, no quibble but I would rather have had what I thought I had ordered. It makes me wonder if this box set did actually exist at one time.

Here’s looking forward to a better New Year.