Bazeer Flumore sent me the following photographs after he visited a bookfair in Clunes, Australia. Clunes has just become the first  Australia booktown so I hope if does better than Atherstone booktown here in the UK which seems to be no more. Bazeer runs the excellent Piz Gloria website for those aficionados of James Bond book covers and while he was looking to enlarge his collection he was also looking for my last three wants but I think failed on both counts.

Here are a few photos of what we missed including a few of those boxes we love to look through hoping to find that one title the dealer missed but ……….

Alan Bott was a WW1 flying ace and was shot down in Turkey. This scene is represented in a painting “The Bott Incident” by Stuart Reid in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.
 He also wrote about this experience and his subsequent escape from a POW camp in the book ‘Easter Nights and Flight’ which was originally published in 4 parts in the Harpers magazine from August 1919. It was also republished by Penguin in 1941.  He escaped with a fellow prisoner who also wrote about this incident in his book ‘Guests Of The Unspeakable’ by T W White.

I shall be updating the Alan Bott pages on the site shortly and will have a lot more details about this and other aspects of his life.

I’m often asked about dust jackets or dust wrappers on the early PANs. Sometimes these were put on as a film tie in such as 48, or to make a dull cover more attractive on the shelf or, and I may be accused of being cynical, a crafty way of upping the price. I have several that are still 1/6 inside but 2/0 on the dustjacket. These are the PANs I have that have jackets 24, 27, 29, 36, 40, 44, 48, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 88, 90 and 138. Unusually I have two different dust jackets for 90 and disappointingly the cover and dust jacket of 138 are identical! Later PANs with dust jackets include X432 and E5 both as film tie-ins. PAN 194 seems to have a dust jacket but I’ll have another blog on that soon.

I was very pleased to get number 68 ‘Late and Soon’ in mint condition as I found it in a secondhand book shop where it appeared to be chaos but the owner knew exactly what he had got. It was not priced but I knew if I gave it to him on its own he notice and put on a hefty price so I ended up buying several from the 10p each shelves and putting 68 near to bottom. Luckily he just looked at the first few, decided they were all 10p and I got out of there very fast!

If you have any that aren’t included please let me, I just looked along the shelf so I may have missed some as well.

Alan Bott not only founded PAN Books but also started The Book Society, The Reprint Society, The British Guild Of Publishers, Avalon Press, jointly help to set up Folio but was also an author in his own right. Bott married Josephine Blumenfeld, daughter of Ralph Blumenfeld (editor of The Express for 30 years) and who was also an author herself having written several titles mainly of short stories such as ‘Shrimps For Tea’, ‘Pin A Rose On Me’ and ‘Heat Of The Sun’ One thing I would like help with is tracking down a picture of her as I’m not sure the one that comes up if you Google is actually her.

This is a proof copy of one of her books that was never published with this title although it contains a short story ‘Birds On The Roof’ which was published as part of a collection under than name.

Fellow Panfan Jules Burt sent me a scan of the back cover of the PAN Record Magazine number 20 from 1956 (I’m still after a copy if anyone has one to spare or any other PAN Records for that matter)
The scan shows the new despatch centre for PAN Books situated in West Molesey which set me wondering if it still existed? I used Google to ‘walk’ the streets but no luck so I decided to write to local organisations. After sending the 9th email and getting no response to any of them (I tried residents associations, history clubs, old folks homes, estate agents, schools and even the vicar) I tried ‘walking ‘ again and I don’t know how I missed it before but found it the second time. It is now a printers and I have an invite from the director to pop in for a look around if I’m in the area. This will probably be in the summer and I’ll add another post if I get there.

Now all I’ve got to do is identify all the books the ladies are packing in the lower photograph on the Record, I’ve managed three so far, answers to follow in a later posting.