TRASHY TUESDAY: BOOK HAUL – PAN COVERS

At a recent bookfair I acquired some nice Pan and Great Pan books, which covered the spectrum of genre fiction. The pick of them are set out below, including some good covers by two of the best artists from the Pan stable, William Francis Phillipps and Dave Tayler.

Phillipps was best known for his innovative use of symbolic artwork on Pan covers, especially for crime novels by Agatha Christie and Leslie Charteris. In the above and below books, however, he produced two classic creepy covers for the Pan Book Of Horror Stories series.

The ghostly figures on The Fourth Pan Book Of Horror Stories (1963) are superbly done from a very limited palette of colours. It is not as gruesome as a lot of 1960s horror covers, but it is subtly creepy and very well done.

In contrast to the cover of The Fourth Pan Book Of Horror Stories (1963), Phillipps’ cover for the The Sixth Pan Book Of Horror Stories (1965) is more explicitly gruesome, with the rat’s tail looped around the eye and nasal cavities of the skull and the wild red glint in its eye. It is probably in keeping with the more grisly contents of the book as suggested by the extracts on the back cover: “from out of her mouth sprang a huge rat, its teeth dripping with blood.”

It also seems that the cover was a good practice run for Phillipps’ later iconic cover for James Herbert’s Rats (New English Library, 1974).

Dave Tayler has been described as one of the most exceptional artists ever to have been used by Pan. His superb covers, noted for the depth of their detail around faces and clothing, graced almost 80 books for Pan. Three of his best are set out below. The one for Christopher Langdon’s A Flag In The City is particularly good, with a Tayler’s attention to detail clearly seen around the face of the man in the red cap and the creases on the clothing.

Also of note is the detailed cover he did for Ian Fleming’s non-James Bond book – The Diamond Smugglers.

Finally, James E McConnell’s cover for Arthur Upfield’s Bony And The Black Virgin (1962) really captures the heat and harshness of the Australian outback. More abstract than the rich, colourful covers McConnell did for Georgette Heyer’s historical fiction books, it is still quite effective.

The above is only a small sampling of the books and covers I got from the book fair, and I will be posting more in the future.