It is 60 years this month (21st November) that Wilbur Smith’s first book was published in hardback namely ‘When The Lion Feeds’  Two years later PAN published it in paperback and it went on to sell over a million copies earning Wilbur a ‘Golden PAN Award’ This was to be the first of his twenty two of these awards. To celebrate the 60th anniversary Zaffre are reissuing it with the cover from 2018 but this one has a 60th sticker. There is a possibility that in South Africa it could be reissued with the PAN Hans Helweg cover from 1970 which is one of my favourites, This could tie in with the opening of the Wilbur Smith Museum in Cape Town. We shall have to wait and see.

In a recent edition of the ‘Fortean Times’ there was a letter from a reader about a mysterious vanishing/moving book. My son has this magazine and thought I might be interested as the book in question, complete with photograph, was ‘More Tales of Unease’ edited by John Burke from 1969 with the weird creepy cover. There was also a mention of ‘The Fourth Ghost Book’ edited by James Turner from 1968.

PAN published at least four of the thirteen titles written by Alvin Toffler (04/09/1928 to 27/06/2016) Wikipedia states “He was an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide.Toffler was an associate editor of Fortune magazine. In his early works he focused on technology and its impact, which he termed “information overload”. In 1970, his first major book about the future, ‘Future Shock’, became a worldwide best-seller and has sold over 6 million copies. He and his wife Heidi Toffler (1929–2019), who collaborated with him for most of his writings, moved on to examining the reaction to changes in society with another best-selling book, ‘The Third Wave’, in 1980. In it, he foresaw such technological advances as cloning, personal computers, the Internet, cable television and mobile communication”

Having enjoyed the films ‘Paddington’ and ‘Paddington 2’ we were looking forward to ‘Paddington in Peru’ but I have to say I was a little disappointed apart from the ‘smelly’ poster which smells of oranges when you rubbed them. It was on one of the large screens and there were all six of us in the cinema which may say something. I felt it lacked the subtle humour and interesting story lines of the previous two but then again maybe I’m not the audience it’s aimed at. PAN published several ‘Paddington’ titles under the Piccolo inprint with artwork by Fred Banbery.

This weeks featured cover is PAN 171 ‘The Saint On Guard’ by Leslie Charteris with artwork by John Pollack. It was used on at least three editions between 1951 and 1954. Pollack painted over twenty five covers for PAN including those for Leslie Charteris but also Agatha Christe, Peter Cheyney and Zane Grey.

‘The Yellow Jersey’ by Ralph Hulme is according to Bicycling Magazine “The greatest cycling novel ever written. . . . An underground classic. . . . A bicycling book that follows a different course—one with characters you can relate to, whose actions raise questions about life on and off the bicycle. . . . The heart of The Yellow Jersey is the Tour de France itself, which serves as a metaphor for life’ It was first published in 1973 with a PAN edition in 1975. I picked up a PAN copy which was well creased on the front cover and thought I’m sure I can get a better copy but having searched around I can find several from other publishers but not PAN so ended up buying it. I’ve started reading it but so far it has not ‘grabbed me’ although I am only a fair weather cyclist.

A while ago I found RUPA publishing in India had printed a copy of ‘Strong Medicine’ by Arthur Hailey but I couldn’t find any further details. I have now found a copy on a booksellers website but it has been sold although the image is still there so I have ‘borrowed it’ and added it to the appropriate page. This was based on the PAN Hailey series of titles which were branded ‘The World’s #1 Storyteller’ and inside it mentions PAN.

This weeks cover used over several editions is PAN 82 ‘Dumb Witness’ by Agatha Christie and is a Hercule Poirot novel from 1937. Between 1949 and 1954 there were at least five editions using the same artwork, albeit modified on some, by J. H. Bruce. Both the 1949 and 1950 editions were printed by Typographie Firmin-Didot, Mesnil, France while the 1954 was printed by Richard Clay and Company, Bungay, Suffolk and has a Flexiback Thermoplastic Binding and not a repair as often described by sellers.

Since I mentioned obtaining the ‘PAN Record’ number 34 last week I have scanned the pages in and added it to the ‘PAN Record’ page. In the past I have tried several different ways of offering the magazines to be read but either the software is too expensive to justify it, the ‘free’ version is to limited or full of ads or the software goes out of fashion like the reader I was using based on flash. At the moment I have only scanned in 30 and 34 but if it is a long cold winter I might be adding more.

One of my favourite artists was the sadly missed Derek A Stowe. I used to ring him up regularly and we would chat about this and that and put the world to rights. It was while putting a page together for him I started looking at ‘Understanding Science’, a magazine published in 144 weekly parts by Sampson Low of which Derek did a large proportion of the artwork. I have become fascinated of late as to how much mileage they got out of these magazines publishing them not only in English but in Spanish. The artwork was also used for several different compilations around a specific science area. My intention is to scan all the 144 covers and put them on a site along with all the spinoffs. To that end I bought a few in German from a bookseller in Czechia called ‘BookBot’ and I’ve been really pleased with the service and especially the price. The hardback copies are the size of an encyclopedia and cost just over £2 each while the carriage was just £4 and they came, very well wrapped, within 5 days. To see an example click HERE

The pop up bookshop has been in Wolverhampton for a few week and I’ve only just got round to visiting it where it has reverted to it’s old Location (next there February 3rd 2025) They have a lot of stock on shelves but sad to say not that many vintage paperbacks. They have been doing this for a few years now so they must know what sells and maybe it isn’t old paperbacks. I did pick up a few of titles as upgrades and a couple of first day covers with stamps painted by Brian Sanders. At 50p a cover with four stamps on each I couldn’t really leave them and my wife bought a postcard from 1883 for the same reason.

A while ago I put on a display of my ‘bits and pieces’ which included a bookmark celebrating PAN’s 50th anniversary. They said it was 1947 to 1997 but I’ve always said it should have been 1944 to 1994 as PAN Books were incorporated on the 1st September 1944. PAN changed its mind this year when they decide to go with 1944 and made this year its 80th anniversary. Somewhere along the line my bookmark disappeared so I was very pleased to pick up another one. This is a guarantee the original will reappear in the next few weeks.

While viewing another of Jules Burt’s excellent videos I noticed it included a copy of the ‘PAN Record’ number 37 which I had not seen before. Up to then I had only reached number 32 but now I know there are more to look out for. This made me do a quick search and I was very pleased to find another, number 34, that I hadn’t got. It turns out Jules and I had both bought our respective editions from the same seller. As always if anyone has a spare copy of the missing editions or can let me have scans of the pages please drop me an email. To view Jules’ video click HERE, the ‘PAN Record’ appears at about 42 minutes. More on number 34 next week.

Doesn’t time fly and the ‘Paperback and Pulp Fair’ is almost upon on us now less than a month away on the 25th November to be held at the Holiday Inn, Bloomsbury, WC1N 1HT. This is always a well worth visiting event as it on at the same time as the Bloomsbury Ephemera Fair also selling paperbacks amongst many other things.

I’d not realised I hadn’t finished rescanning in covers and adding original artwork to all the Cecil Saint-Laurent titles I included last week. My excuse is that we were down in Kent for our Grandsons birthday plus being involved with the multimillion pound upgrade to our disused railway line which will become a surfaced walking/cycleway after we spent seven years doing over 80% of the work to get it ready. The contractors are now on site and hopefully will be finished by next year. I also found I had some non PAN Saint-Laurent titles in French from J’ai Lu, include another of his characters Captain Steel, as I like their cover style.

After including some of the Topliner titles by Christopher Leach I noticed that ‘Answering Miss Roberts’ had also been published in the States by Scholastic. I’m not sure why but they retitled it to ‘Kate’s Story’ and flip the photo image on the cover. The other addition was in the PAN Study Aids Revision Cards. I have a few but came across the ones for ‘Computer Studies’ and ‘Accountancy’ I didn’t have. No problem with the former but many excuses from the seller as to why I haven’t got the latter so I have given up on that for now.

Watching the new series of ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ on Channel 5 reminded me of the non vet trilogy from John Holgate as a “townie’ trying farming. I’ve not actually read them and from the look of my copies neither has any else but they are now on my ‘to read sometime’ shelf.

Jacques Laurent or Jacques Laurent-Cély, writer and journalist, was born in Paris on the 5th January 1919  and died in Paris on 29th  December 2000. He wrote numerous novels under several pen names with PAN publishing the titles where he used the name Cecil saint-Laurent. PAN seemed to like the novels featuring young ladies! A couple of dozen of his works were made into films including ‘Caroline Cherie’ in 1951.

Caroline Cherie appears in four titles including X102  ‘Caroline Cherie’ (incorrectly numbered as X104) X162 ‘The Loves of Caroline Cherie’, X282 ‘The Intrigues of Caroline Cherie’ and M42 ‘Caroline Cherie and Juan’ Looking at lists there appears to be more in this series but that could just be down to different translation of the titles from French. Clotilde appears in two titles namely M7 ‘Clotilde’ and X127 ‘Encore Clotilde’ while Bernadette is just in one this being M79 ‘Algerian Adventure’

I wonder why there are not bidders for this?

HOMAGE An allusion or imitation by one artist to another. In 2020 Véhicule Press of Canada published under the imprint Ricochet Books ‘The Ravine’ by Phyllis Brett Young. They used the same artwork as the PAN edition and mention the cover was adapted by J W Stewart but not that the original was by Pat Owen whose signature is at the bottom right. The PAN edition G663 has the author as Kendal Young while the Ricochet edition uses her real name. PAN published three other titles by Young. There appears to be two variants , one with the extra writing as on the PAN edition and one without.

PASTICHE An artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period. TV/Film extra of more that 2,000 appearances, John R Walker, has written several books and uses a style of cover similar to other publishers. The one I noticed was ‘Dial Extra for Murder’ from 2023 which is a pastiche of PAN. He also used Target and Coronet for other titles. He was voted ‘Britain’s Most Prolific Television Extra’ in 2013 and has been an extra for over 15 years so watch out Jules. He now works as 1st Assistant Director at the BBC.

PAN published the ‘Avaryan Rising’ trio by Judith Tarr all with artwork by different artists namely Peter Mennim, Patrick Jones and Fred Gambino. I like the artwork but not they are in B format which doesn’t look right on the shelf with all the other titles. Tarr also wrote three more titles to make it six in the trio namely ‘Arrows of the Sun‘. ‘Spear of Heaven‘ and ‘Tides of Darkness’

Having picked up a copy of ‘The Send-Off’ by Christopher Leach which I actually read and enjoyed I looked to see if PAN had published anymore of his titles but it appears this was the only one. What I did find was he has written five titles in the Topliner series, two published as hardback and three as softback.

Topliners were originally published by PAN/Macmillan and then taken over solely by Macmillan. Of the five by Leach it is odd that ‘Answering Miss Roberts’ clearly says Macmillan on the back but has a PAN ISBN. The two hardback say the jackets are designed by a familiar name, ‘Young Artists’

Looking at a copy of ‘Options’ by Freda Bright I thought it looked different to the one I had. Turns out I was right in that there are two versions from 1882 where one has a photo of a lady in a hat on the front and a lady with a roll neck sweater on the back and reversed on the other. I’m left wondering why? Was it just a play on the title and how were they put on the shelves, a random number of each? PAN published some of her other titles in the 2000s.

In the 1970s PAN published or republished a series of titles they called the ‘PAN Classics’ of which I had 27 and an image of a variant of ‘Jane Eyre’. I still wanted this but after ordering a couple of times when I ended up with the one I’ve already in spite of the picture showing otherwise I thought I’d give it a rest until I spotted a copy not on a ‘stack them high, sell them cheap’ site. For once I actually got the right one plus a copy of ‘Bleak House’ which I’m really pleased to add to the page as I hadn’t seen it before. I’ve no clue as to the artist of the latter but at nearly 900 pages it is quite a door stop. I’m left wondering how many more there might be out there still to find?

Today (30th September) is a sad day in that it is the funeral of Pat, Kitty Peffer’s sister and Sam ‘PEFF’ Peffer’s sister in law. Pat never really got over the effects of COVID and complications arising from that. The funeral will take place in the small village where she lived and is for family and friends only.

I have posted several pages of Agatha Christie series covers from PAN in the past (‘Double Dagger‘, ‘White Top‘, ‘All Photo‘) but Fontana also published her titles with the most well know probably being with covers by Tom Adams. Not so common are those with covers mainly by Martin Baker called ‘the foxtail series’ because of the ‘g’ For no real reason I find I have amassed quite a few of these editions so for a change this week I’m including these covers just because I like most of them apart from the biography which spoils the set by having a photo and is B format unlike the others which are A format. I don’t think Martin painted any for PAN but Tom Adams did so I’m using that as my spurious link. If you know of any I don’t have, as a sad old completest can I ask please email details me.  I can’t find out much about Martin Baker, was he the same Martin who wrote ‘Artists of the Radio Times’?

‘The Dragon’ by Alfred Coppel is a problem in that there were two versions of the cover but the date/printing information inside is identical as PAN seems to be using the same text block . The only way I can guess which is the oldest is by looking at the price. The earlier one uses the same Alun Hood artwork as the Macmillan hardback while the later is by David Bergen. Alfred Coppel was born Alfredo Jose de Arana-Marini Coppel (09/11/1921 – 30/05/2004) in America. He wrote several science fiction short stories and thirty one books of which PAN published just one more namely ’34 East’

I’m always on the look out for reading, proof or reviews copies of PAN titles as they are usually a little different from the published edition. This time it’s an ‘Special Advance Reading Copy’ no less for ‘The Sisters’ by Robert Littell from 1987. Inside it says there was going to be a major PAN promotion but so far I’ve not found anything that could be related to a campaign for this title. It is different in that the PAN logo is at the top of the spine. Robert Littell had written seven novels by the time PAN published this one but it wasn’t until the 2000’s that they published any more of his books.