Having speculated on why PAN only published three Robert Rankin tiles I’m now wondering why it was similar with Liz Cody? PAN published her first Anna Lee novel ‘Dupe’ in 1982, followed by the second ‘Bad Company’ in 1983. Her third ‘Stalker’ was published by Collins in hardback in 1984 but a paperback edition didn’t follow until Bantam’s US edition in 1989 with a UK edition from Arrow in 1992 as a TV tie-in. There are six Anna Lee titles in total with ‘Head Case’ from 1985, ‘Under Contract’ from 1986 and ‘Backhand from 1991 being the other three.

I’d also thought PAN published a lot more Len Deighton titles than they actually did with a grand total of TWO found so far. I will be going through my many years of Whitaker’s “Paperbacks in Print’ to see if I’ve missed any. There is a tenuous link to a third PAN ‘The Valley of Fear’ by Conan Doyle in that Deighton wrote the introduction. He is also mentioned on the front of ‘The Day Before Sunrise’ and ‘All The Drowning Seas’ with a couple of endorsement lines.What is really annoying is that I know I have a copy of ‘Bomber’ with the aeroplane on the cover but can I find it? I think it must have got misplaced on the shelves when I moved to the collection. According to one website ‘Bomber’ was the first book to have been written using a ‘word processor’ supplied by IBM.

We lost William Goldman (12/8/31 to 16/11/2018) last Friday and so I’m again linking to a page of his PAN covers I put on a blog last February.

…. and finally pleased to see the Wolverhampton Pop Up Bookshop is back for two weeks from today. I can usually find a few titles and I’ve already spotted one I’m interested in in their advertising photos.

Since Chrome has now decided my website is ‘Not Secure’ albeit I don’t ask for any passwords or credit card information I don’t want people to feel put off visiting the site when they see the message so this week I’m ‘biting the bullet’ and splashing out £25 a year for a SSL certificate. If this blog or website doesn’t appear next week it’s probably because I’ve screwed up all the settings!

I recently saw the Fawcett edition of ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ by Brian Aldiss and it looks almost the same as the PAN edition. The original hardback with this artwork appeared in 1973 with the paperbacks in 1975 but I’m left wondering why there as so many little changes on the PAN version, apart from the obvious face added, such as the way the hair falls and was this done by Paul Bacon the artist?

I must apologise to fellow PAN Fan Fred Cheetham who came over from Vancouver, Canada to see my collection and for me then to talk to him continuously about PAN Books. This sounds a little grander than it was it that he was actually staying in Shrewsbury with his brother and popped over on the train from there and not BC! Fred at one time worked for Collins who had the distribution rights for PAN in Canada.

For Halloween the BBC are putting on a series of 15 minute dramas based on ‘The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories’ starting on the 29th. I seem to remember they also did a similar thing with the first in 2012 but can’t find backup to confirm this.I’ve also noticed that yesterday (28th) the BBC were starting a dramatisation of “The Little Drummer Girl” by John Le Carre in six parts.

Talking of the ‘Horror’ books I was going to feature Stuart Bodek this week who painted the cover of number 27 but I’m still waiting for some replies to emails send out a while ago, watch this space.

Last year I was contacted by author Steve Turner regarding ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac and asking if I knew who the cover artists was? Although I’ve never been able to discover for certain who it might be, or where the original artwork is, I have long suspected it could be by Hans Helweg as he was prolific around the early 60’s with several that can be attributed to him very close number wise and in the same style.

‘The Voice at the Back Door’ is number X77 and definitely has HH on it while ‘On The Road’ is X84 and I can Image there is possibly a similar H on that? I contacted Sue Helweg, Han’s widow and she kindly replied “I don’t know for sure about the Kerouac but it is certainly very much like his work – I will see if I can track down any further info. I do still have a good deal of his original work”

Steve wrote a book published in 1996 on Kerouac called ‘Angelheaded Hipster’ and he is hoping to write another following the trail in ‘On The Road’ taking photos of the book in the locations mentioned. Steve has kindly sent me some examples shown HERE

I have a list of titles that I’ve come across on other peoples websites and if I see them for sale somewhere economically priced I might buy them but they are not top of the list. One was ‘The Complete Jogger’ by Bruce Tulloh which seemed to be very elusive but I then realised I was looking for ‘Tulloch’ and not ‘Tulloh’, suddenly hundreds of copies! Interestingly the runner on the cover is the late Simon Master who just happened to be around when they need someone to be photographed. Simon was at PAN in the 1970’s and in his obituary it says “Most people in publishing would have recognised Simon from the 1970s and ‘80s, a tall distinguished figure with impossibly thick-rimmed glasses. He and Sonny Mehta became legends from their time at Pan and Picador; Simon was first publishing director at Pan, then chief executive—the youngest head of a major publishing company at the time—from 1979 until 1987. Patrick Janson- Smith once summed up the Golden Age of paperback publishing as “Mehta & Master” Now I don’t want to name drop but as I said to Sonny at the PAN 70th birthday bash ……!

Just wondering why PAN only published two of the three titles in Victor Canning’s ‘Smiler’ series. I thought it might be because the third part was written much later than the other two but the hardback version was published in 1974. Puffin published all three titles in 1979.

Having found a couple of authors where two of their titles are linked by the cover artwork I’m wondering if there are any more? I know some of the PAN/Ballantine’s (all titles will be added eventually) have the artwork from the front of one on the back of another plus the Julian May panoramas. I’ve put a couple of examples HERE although I had to fiddle the Tevis covers to line up by taking a bit off the top of one and a bit of the bottom of the other but no such problem with the Harris. I’ve emailed Paul Roberts, the artist who painted ‘Bodyguard 2’ used for the Thomas Kyd covers, but no reply so far.

Just because I have them to hand I’ve put the three Robert Rankin titles in the ‘Brentford Trilogy’ on a page. Not sure why they all had to have so disparate covers and did Rankin have a falling out with PAN in that they didn’t publish any of his later titles of which there are nine in this series?

Sometimes I look at something and wonder ‘Why’, is this art or just a way to spoil a good book? If you are keen to have something like this by Dave Buonaguidi you’ll need to outbid the current one of £50!

I’m still intrigued as to why PAN felt the need to bring out so many different covers for the same title sometimes very close together. One example is ‘AIRPORT’ by Arthur Hailey with two editions from 1970, one from 1978 and another from 1979. The first two are both film tie-ins and the later ones sort of go with the different series covers. I’ve also included a couple of titles from film spin offs.

A while ago I started a page of covers of the early to mid 70’s PAN Classics series. I thought I had most of them until I popped into a local charity shop and amongst the few books on the shelf was a copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and I hadn’t got it. I had to think carefully about spending all of 50p even though it was buy one get one free …………..! This really doesn’t happen very often these days as anything published in the ‘last century’ doesn’t appear to be worth putting on the shelves in most charity shops.

I’ve previously mentioned my Great Great Great Grandfather Charles Lowe, who had a second-hand book shop in Birmingham, as my excuse for not being able to stop buying books although it doesn’t really convince my wife. I’ve tried to track down a photo of his premises for quite a while and have just found one in the Birmingham Library’s archives. It’s from around 1889 showing the shop as ‘To Let’  as looking in trade directories he is not listed in 1888 but as being there in 1890. Now to find one when it was a bookshop.

Having just picked up a copy of ‘The Case of the Lazy Lover’ by E S Gardner from 1972 I looked at the back and found it was another title in the series that PAN occasionally called;Soritng out the covers that are the same style I find I have 15 Gardner’s so far and they can be seen HERE listed in date order. Please let me know if you have any more to add.

I also picked up an unread copy of ‘Farthest Star’ by Frederick Pohl and Jack Williamson and is the first title in the ‘Saga of Cuckoo’ series but only this title was published by PAN. It has been signed by Pohl who did it very carefully and I’ve resorted to taking a photo rather than putting it on the scanner so as not to force it open.The cover for ‘Farthest Star’ is by Bob Layzell and I contacted him and he kindly replied “I’m afraid I no longer have a copy of “Farthest Star” but you may use any photo’s from my albums. I remember the art director of Pan at that time was called Dave Larkin who was very helpful and introduced me to “Young Artists” This cover was also the first I had published in 1976′ It surprises me how many of the ‘Young Artists’ covers for PAN were recycled for the ‘Anticipation’ s/f series by Fleuve Noir in France.

I also picked up a bookmark for ‘Bind Your Own’ (BYO) and this time advertising a PAN tile ‘The Last Enemy’ unlike the last one which was for a Fontana title. With the PAN covers you can also see the Dell cover  of ‘Falling Through Space’ the title ‘The Last Enemy’ was given first in the States.How to turn a perfectly good book into one that isn’t in 10 minutes or less!