PAN Fans Club

Let's talk about PAN paperbacks, the blog for those that do judge a book by its cover. Main site is at www.tikit.net or www.panfans.club

PAN Fans Club - Let's talk about PAN paperbacks, the blog for those that do judge a book by its cover. Main site is at www.tikit.net or www.panfans.club

Category Archives: Artists

Antoine de Saint-Expury, Colin Dexter and Peter McGinn

Well here we are a week after all the updates and my website seems to have survived. It is now telling me there is an update to my theme but as it has been saying that for a long time I will ignore it as I think I’d lose all the changes I’ve made to it’s appearance over the years.

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry was a French aviator who disappeared during WW2. He had three of his works published by PAN, two concerned with flying ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’ and ‘Flight to Arras‘ plus his children’s book ‘The Little Prince’ I was reminded of these as the first two have covers with GDA on them for Gino d’Achille.

Not a true PAN Colin Dexter but I did pick up ‘As Good as Gold’ which was a ‘give away’ by Kodak but published by PAN. An added bonus, which I didn’t realise at the time, was that it is inscribed and signed by Colin.

Last week one of the Hammer Horror books had a cover by Peter McGinn and I’m pleased to say, thanks to the help of his son John, who is also an artist, I made contact. John is currently in Hong Kong but gave me his father’s phone number in the States and I rang Peter and had a very long chat with him at his home in Sarasota, Florida. Although 87 and ‘retired’ he still paints.

Last week one of the Hammer Horror books had a cover by Peter McGinn and I’m pleased to say, thanks to the help of his son John, who is also an artist, I made contact. John is currently in Hong Kong but gave me his father’s phone number in the States and I rang Peter and had a very long chat with him at his home in Sarasota, Florida. Although 87 and ‘retired’ he still paints.

  • Peter McGinn in the States
  • Peter with Willie Rushton in Edinburgh

Although the Hammer one might be the only cover Peter did for PAN he painted many for other publishers. He studied at the Edinburgh College of Art, was involved with the Edinburgh International Festival , he worked in the middle east as an ETV production designer and schools programming//designer/instuctor for the BBC, he worked in Poland making films for which he had to learn Polish, was Professor of Figure Drawing and Painting/ Illustration at Ringling College of Art and Design, collaborator with John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art plus many more jobs. I hope to have another chat with him one day as he said he’d love to go out for a drink and compare notes on people at PAN.

The Hammer House of Horror

This week I have had to install a backup for this blog, then run the WordPress update and also update the version of PHP to 7.3 so I’ve been reluctant to do too much to it in case it all went wrong. Plus I have been working down our old railway track or our allotment in spite of Storm Gareth so I’ve only one item but it’s a quality one.

I was sorting through boxes of bits and pieces I had put on one side moving my collection to my ‘library’ last year when I came across some John Burke contracts including three related to the Hammer Horror titles, namely ‘The Hammer Horror Omnibus’ English ‘and Italian editions and “The Second Hammer Horror Omnibus” English edition. I contacted Johnny Mains who pointed me in the right direction to get the Italian edition but when I showed him the Dutch edition, which he didn’t know about he said “****”

I was surprised to find that the Dutch edition was published by K-Tel who I always thought of as producing those products that were suitable to give to some one who had everything such as the brush-o-matic and the disc-o-matic. The latter was a record selector and I actually still have a couple somewhere along with some of the compilation records tha K-Tel produced.

With this new version of WordPress there seems to be a lot more options such as having coloured backgrounds etc and tempted as I am to use them all I’ll stick with my tried and tested format although I’m not saying there won’t an occasional foray into different realms!

Having now played around with this version a bit more I think I prefer the earlier one but I have discovered I can switch parts of it back to ‘Classic’ ie the previous version. If I use that with the ability to add html I might be able to do what was so simple before.

PS Still waiting to hear back from four artists but as it is now 2 months since writing to one of then I may put that down as a failure!

Janet Sandison aka Jane Duncan, Dexter additions and raw fingers!

After falling off a ladder last week in our side passage and managing to run the fingers of my hands down both brick walls trying to brace myself I have nicely skinned all my finger tips. This is making typing and using a mouse a little painfully but on the plus side it has got me out of a lot of other things!

I eventually got the last title in the ‘An Apology for the Life of Jean Robinson’ series by Elizabeth Jane Cameron who wrote as Jane Duncan writing as Janet Sandison! Janet Sandison was the name of the main heroine in her ‘My Friends” series in which there were nineteen titles with fourteen of them published by PAN. I’ve not found artists for the first three titles but I did find a reference to the fourth being by Jooce Garrett and I’ve sent him an email to see if this is correct.

I also picked up another three editions in the Colin Dexter ‘Morse’ series that have the PAN Man logo on them from 1983 and 1984 (LBTW, TSWONQ, TROTTM) They might be seen as the ‘International’ editions as they are not TV tie-ins for countries where the series was probably not broadcast and on the plus side I don’t think they’ve ever been read.

If the fingers are up to it I’ll try and re scan all the Jane Duncan ‘My Friends’ titles and put them on one page as they are still under their PAN numbers at the moment.

UPDATE Have just heard back from Jooce Garrett to say that the Sandison cover is his and was the first one he did. Have also heard from Paul Wright who asked me to remind him which PAN covers were his which I’ve done and awaiting further communication.

Brian Garfield, Carola Salisbury and a couple of updates.

A little late but I’ve only just noticed we lost Brian Garfield on the 29th December, He wrote over 60 books under various names but PAN only published seven under his real name. He is probably most well know for the novel ‘Death Wish’ which was not published by PAN but a few others that were were made into films including ‘Hopscotch’ in 1980 and ‘Death Sentence’ from 2007. I’m still awaiting two of the titles but I’ve included scans from the internet until they arrive. See them HERE.

Another author who wrote under his own name of John Michael ‘Mike’ Butterworth (born on the 10th January 1924 in Nottingham) also used the pseudonym of Carola Salisbury and this time PAN only published those using the Salisbury name. As well as writing romance he also scripted ‘The Trigan Empire’ comic strip and was also credited with starting the ‘Playhour’ comic which gives me the excuse to resurrect my personalised artwork of Harry  Hamster who featured in it. Again two scans from the net but hoping to replace them soon with real scans, see them all HERE.

I’m still trying to get hold of copies of all the books featured in the ‘PAN Classsics’ series and I managed to get copies of ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Joseph Andrews’ but they were in a pile of other titles I didn’t really want but at a I price couldn’t resist. Looks like a National Trust bookshop will be getting another donation soon. 

One other book I’ve been trying to get for a while is the 1990 copy of ‘Storm Warning’ by Jack Higgins so when I saw one listed by a company that up to now has been 100% right in their descriptions as 1990 New Ed I though I’d got it but as usual turns out to be the same old 1977 edition as used in all the stock photos. Not sure why I want this one as I have a good image off the net but then I did have the rule that I would only include covers I actually had and I am still trying to make that true.

Website Crash, Grace Matalious and Stuart Bodek Again

After saying the moving of my website to another server so it could be secure seemed to have worked, well I seemed to have spoken too soon. On Tuesday it went down! For four and a half hours I was one of the 5% that my hosting company told me were affected on their clustering Linux servers. Now usually I’m more than happy to be in the minority but not this time although dare I say it, things appear to be back to normal. I am left wondering how clustering servers go down when I thought the idea was you could switch between them if problems occurred?

Back to what we should be talking about and that is PAN Books and in this case those from Grace Metalious. I did look to see if there was any specific date attached to her for now but unfortunately not. The reason I’m including Grace is that I picked up a 1970 edition of ‘Return to Peyton Place’ and looked to see how many variations I had of this and her other three titles published by PAN. The results are HERE and I’m sure there must be others I’ve not got. I also have the original artwork shown but have no idea as to the artist, can anyone help?

Metalious was awarded a posthumous ‘Golden PAN’ for selling over a million copies of ‘Peyton Place’ having died in 1964 at the all too early age of 39. Ian Fleming’s ‘Golden PAN’ was also awarded posthumously.

I’ve now got a copy of ‘Chalkhill Blue’ with the Stuart Bodek cover. The third title in this series ‘Painted Lady’ doesn’t have a Bodek cover. I also found a 1982 Guinness calendar with an example of his work. It includes pictures from other PAN artists like Mike Brownfield and Chris Moore.

..… and finally my wife and I were going to go down to the south coast last week to park the camper on Gordon Young’s drive while I got the rest of his story of his rise from ship’s boy on the ‘Laloun’ to export manager at PAN. Unfortunately, his wife of only 5 months, Chrissie, has gone down with shingles. We wish her a speedy recovery and hope to reschedule when the weathers a bit better in the Spring.

 

Now Secure, Robert Rankin and Stuart Bodek.

After being away for few days in North Yorkshire I came back on Thursday, bit the bullet and started the process of obtaining a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate for my website. The first part involved moving the site to a secure server and then issuing the certificate. This seemed to go fairly well but my site still said ‘Not Secure’ I got in touch with the help desk of my hosting company and they said I needed to add extra code to a file in the root directory. This was beginning to be a little outside my comfort zone but after making backups and Googling to find the code I went ahead and it appears to have worked as it now says it is a secure site. Unfortunately, due to my site being 19 years old next month, there is a lot of Legacy coding apparently (mainly frames which were cutting edge in 1999!) so as a work round until the day I update it all(!) the Blog and Search, because they use external links, load into a new window. Before nothing appeared when links to these pages were clicked possibly due to the enhanced security unless anyone knows better?

After speculating on why PAN only published three of Robert Rankin’s Brentford titles I heard from Mike Petty, who took over the Picador list from Caroline Lassalle in  1977 and he kindly offered the following information;

“I can shed some light on your Robert Rankin query. I published the Trilogy at Pan, thanks to some prompting from Alan Aldridge. I can no longer remember why the covers were so different, but I suspect No.1 didn’t sell so they thought they’d try a different approach for No.2. I’d left Pan by the time No.3 came out. You’d have to ask David Larkin or Gary Day-Ellison what the story was.

After a couple of years at Chatto I then moved on to Sphere/Abacus. I kept in touch with Robert, and nothing much was happening for him at Pan, so I published the Trilogy again, in one volume this time, plus No.4, The Sprouts of Wrath.

I then moved to Bloomsbury, where I published Armageddon: The Musical, They Came and Ate Us and The Suburban Book of the Dead. These were picked up in paperback by Corgi, who subsequently republished his backlist and became his primary publishers. I can’t remember how that happened, but ££ probably had something to do with it”

I recently contacted Terry Sandy at Durban High School regarding one of their alumni, artist Stuart (or Steward) Bodek and Terry replied at an amazing speed. He gave me the name and email address of a fellow pupil and artist, David Whitehead, who moved to the UK at the same time a Stuart but I’ve not managed to make contact, does anyone know of him?  Stuart was born in South Africa on the 17th of July 1947 and died all to soon in January 1996. I email Cecil Vieweg as he was a fellow South African just on the off chance and he kindly replied;

“Yes! I remember Stuart Bodek very well. I met him on arrival at Artist Partners, fresh faced and full of hope and ambition, but awestruck and humble meeting some of the old pros. Although he had some advertising experience, his knowhow and methods were still be experienced. I took him under my wing and we became good friends. Such a great pity that his life ended at a relatively young age. I’m not to sure about the details, but he died on or shortly after a tennis match. Late eighties, early nineties? He was represented by Artist Partners”

I have since found that Stuart married Carolyn Kaffel in Hendon in the early part of 1979. I’ve put a few of his PAN covers HERE and also included one by Liz Moyes as a place holder. Annoyingly I ordered the 1984 copy of ‘Chalkhill Blue’ a while ago and got the 1988 edition without the ‘PAN Man’ logo and so gave it away as in my new inclusion rule. Last week I ordered the 1988 edition (which broke my new inclusion rule!) as the cover was by Stuart Bodek and this time got the 1984 edition! Hopefully the right one will appear next week.Part cover of ‘Burning Bright’ by Brian Sanders featuring Liz Sanders nee Moyes.

Gino D’Achille and Recycled Artwork

As promised last week I’ve scanned in my artwork by Gino D’Achille and although not PAN, Panther is close! Click HERE to see it.

I also bought a copy of ‘Anticipation’ about the French mainly sci-fi series of books published by Fleuve Noir. Some sellers are asking over £50 for a copy so when I saw it at 12 euros on Amazon I ordered a copy. I then got a message from the seller asking where the price came from as it should be 25 euros? I said that was the price shown and then expected the order to be cancelled but it wasn’t and honoured at the price quoted. The postage was also 12 euros but turns out it was sent from a publishers here in the UK so maybe a bit step. Could be the postage and book price got mixed up but I’m happy.

Many of the covers were recycled from the ‘Young Artists’ group in the UK some starting out as PAN covers.. When I mentioned this on Facebook Jean-Daniel Brèque commented  “ALL of them were recycled. I know at least two writers who worked for Fleuve Noir at the time and who regularly went to the office of the publisher to pick their covers in advance. My friend Michel Pagel, who was working on a tetralogy, specifically picked up four Les Edwards covers featuring a skull in order to make his books stand out”

To see a couple of Terry Oakes covers click HERE. Jean-Daniel also mentioned a website which shows many examples, click HERE to go to the page for Terry Oakes then maybe use the search and go to the Les Edwards page.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” was supposedly said by Lao Tzu and I feel a bit like that with “The scanning of a thousand plus books starts with number one” I’m embarking on the task of rescanning all my numbered titles which would be 2,391 if they only had one edition but some have several different covers such as “Lost Horizon”. I’m also using it as a chance to rebuild my spreadsheet. So far I’ve done all of numbers 1 and 2!This is the spreadsheet so far, still deciding if this is all the columns I’ll need? I’ve got thumbnails images as comments so they appear when I hover over plus hyperlinked to the image so I can edit them easily if need be.

I came across this newspaper article which seemed to be particularly pertinent after talking about the above.

I had to get a copy of Justin Marriott’s new publication “Hot Lead” (available from Amazon) as the cover features ‘Hart’ draw by Gino d’Achille although he now appears to be left handed. I’ve show all the ‘Hart covers’ before but HERE is the link again.I have looked for some affordable original Gino artwork for a while and only this week realised I’ve had one for years. While sorting non PAN books I looked on the back of a Panther title of which I have the artwork and it is credited to Gino, something I’ve missed before. When I locate the artwork I’ll put it on a blog.

William Goldman, a signed copy by Alexander Cordell and a puzzle.

While looking at images of PAN books I spotted a copy of “The Princess Bride by William Goldman I’d not see before. I thought this would be easy to get but was surprised at the price someone wanted on AbeBooks.After another search I found this on Amazon ……
…… but in the end I got a copy for the penny plus postage from Amazon. What I always wonder is “Does anyone really buy books at the over the top prices?”

I was pleased to see PAN had included the name of the artist for “The Princess Bride” and it was a familiar one, Brian Sanders. I emailed him and he replied:
“Another blast from the past. Thank you. Yes I certainly remember making the artwork commissioned by Dave Larkin for Princess Bride, although it was in another life, when I lived in the lower reaches of Highgate. The young lady who modelled for me was the daughter of a neighbour. They lived less than fifty yards away. Warren Michel and family were in between; before he made it big time and moved up to Bishop’s Avenue. Forty years on the child princess bride must be in her late 50s”
Click HERE to see this and other Goldman covers from PAN.

I also picked up a signed copy of “Rape of the Fair Country” by Alexander Cordell and then spent the next half hour looking at his signature in other books and I think it could be a genuine one. Click HERE to see it and the original artwork from one of my favourite cover artists, Hans Helweg.

Not PAN but book related. BBC Radio 4’s Today programme has a ‘Puzzle of the Day’ and here’s the one from last Friday which I got wrong – again!
“I have an encyclopaedia of animals on my shelf, which comes in two volumes. On the left is the Aardvark to Lynx volume, and next to it on the right is the volume for Mackerel to Zebra. Each volume is 5cm thick. The covers are 2mm thick. I have bookmarked two pages, Aardvark and Zebra. How far apart would you say the two bookmarks are, to the nearest centimetre?”
Answer next week.

A Couple of Celebrations.

Missed it again, this websites birthday on the 16th so belated greetings for its coming of age – 18 years and still going strong.
Here’s to many more blogs and postings and hopefully comments from anyone reading them.

With Christmas coming up I thought I’d share a piece of seasonal artwork by PAN cover stalwart Glenn Steward I bought off eBay for peanuts, I think it cost me more in postage than I paid for the artwork itself. He painted it as an idea for his personal card for 1995. I like Glenn’s work and have a few examples including the perennial favourite ‘The PAN Book of Card Games’ used for thirty years over several editions. I also have the front and back covers of ‘That Magnificent Air Race’ and the ‘Hanging Hitchcock’ which my wife hates (I really must update a couple of those pages)

Although not that much is know about Steward he was a very keen cyclist and was art editor for ‘The Sporting Cyclist’ with a seasonal issue like this which doesn’t seem to contain any of his artwork so here are a couple of cyclist he painted for a greetings card.
… and finally I went out for a Christmas lunch for members of ‘The Friends of Pelsall Commons’ as my wife and I are ‘Wardens of the Little Commons’ which means we do grand things like litter picks. It was at lunchtime and half a bottle of wine was beginning to take its toll but at least I’m wearing my PAN top as they said wear something red and that was all I could find – honestly!