Publishing History > Picador Books (Pan Books) - Book Series List
Picador Books
Publisher: Pan Books. Country: U.K. Date: 1972- .
A Traveller's Life
by Eric Newby
London, Pan Books, 1983 (Picador Books)
Paperback. 302 pages.
Cover blurb: "Eric Newby's life of travel began with strange adventures in prams, forays into the lush jungles of Harrods with his mother and into the perilous slums of darkest Hammersmith on his way to school. Such beginnings aroused his curiosity about more outlandish places, a wanderlust satisfied equally by travels through the London sewers, by bicycle to Italy and through wildest New York. His book chronicles the whole range of situations into which he has thrown himself with characteristic verve and optimism, and his perception of the incongruous is as sharp when travelling abroad in search of high fashion, as buyer to a chain of department stores, as it is when recalling his reluctant participation in a tiger shoot in India."
PICADOR BOOKS (PAN)
Series Note: "At Pan, under the management of Ralph Vernon-Hunt and later Simon Master, and with the brilliant and charismatic Sonny Mehta as editorial director, these were powerhouse years for Macmillan, a period of tremendous commercial success, as well as innovative literary publishing. Mehta took the farsighted move in 1972 of launching Picador, a list characterised at first as cultish and cutting-edge but with always promotable fiction and nonfiction. In another innovative move, Mehta published Michael Herr's Vietnam War reportage Dispatches (1977) as a paperback original--until then, and indeed for a long time after, publishers brought out all but the most down-market titles in hardback first, in part because they feared that they would not get any review coverage otherwise. But Dispatches was immediately greeted as a classic. It was some years after Picador's arrival that other publishers--responding to factors such as the prominence of the Booker Prize, the growth of the bookselling chains and the expansion of broadsheet newspapers--brought out their own upmarket paperback imprints. (These imprints were often called 'B format' lists, by contrast with 'A format,' rack-sized mass-market paperbacks.) By this time, Picador already boasted a strong list of some of the rising stars of British fiction, such as Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, as well as many leading international authors. There was, according to The Times (London), a 'Picador generation.' "
Source: The Macmillan Story: Bringing Authors and Readers Together Since 1843, Macmillan, 2026, p. 32
Further reading:
- Picador Books - a later book series launched by Pan Books in 1980
- Picador (imprint) (Wikipedia)
Select list of the Picador Books series (1972-1989) arranged by author and title
Renate Adler - Speedboat
Candida Baker - Yacker 1: Australian Writers Talk About their Work
Candida Baker - Yacker 2
Candida Baker - Yacker 3
Richard Brautigan - A Confederate General in Big Sur
Jorge Luis Borges - A Personal Anthology
John Brockman/Edward Rosenfeld - Real Time
Stephen Brook - New York Days, New York Nights
Dee Brown - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Jan Harold Brunvand - The Vanishing Hitchhiker
Robert Byron - The Road to Oxiana
Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino - Our Ancestors
Elias Canetti - Auto da fe
Peter Carey - Bliss
Peter Carey - Exotic Pleasures
Bruce Chatwin - In Patagonia
Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines
Robert S. de Ropp - The Master Game - Pathway to Higher Consciousness - Beyond the Drug Experience
Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Robert Drewe - The Bodysurfers
Robert Drewe - A Cry in the Jungle Bar
Robert Drewe - Fortune
Robert Drewe - The Savage Crows
Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco - Travels in Hyperreality
David Foster - Moonlite
Jorge Amado Gabriela - Clove and Cinnamon
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Germaine Greer - The Madwoman's Underclothes .........
Germaine Greer - The Obstacle
Henry Green - Loving/Living/Party Going
G. I. Gurdjieff - Meetings with Remarkable Men
Sadegh Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Alex Haley - Roots
Knut Hamsun - Hunger
Knut Hamsun - Mysteries
Knut Hamsun - Victoria
Knut Hamsun - The Wanderer......
Knut Hamsun - Wayfarers
Hermann Hesse - Autobiographical Writings
Hermann Hesse - If the War Goes On
Hermann Hesse - Klingsor's Last Summer
Hermann Hesse - Rosshalde
Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha
William Hinton - Shenfan (NN: not ....)
Russell Hoban - Kleinzeit
Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary
Russell Hoban - The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
Keri Hulme - The Bone People
Robert Hunter - The Greenpeace Chronicle
Clive James - Visions Before Midnight
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Frederick R. Karl / Leo Hamalian - The Existentialism Imagination
Frederick R. Karl / Leo Hamalian - The Naked i
Maxine Hong Kingston - The Woman Warrior
Arthur Koestler - The Act of Creation
Arthur Koestler - Bricks to Babel
Arthur Koestler - The Case of the Midwife Toad
Arthur Koestler - The Ghost in the Machine
Arthur Koestler - The Roots of Consciousness
Ring Lardner - The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner
Anita Loos - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Norman Mailer - Ancient Evenings
Thomas Mallon - A Book of One's Own: People and their Diaries
David Malouf - An Imaginary Life
Alberto Manguel, ed. Black Water: An Anthology of Fantastic Literature
Peter Matthiessen - The Tree Where Man was Born
Moments of Venus: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse
William Least Heat-Moon. Blue Highways: A Journey into America
H. H. Munro (Saki) - The Best of Saki
Vladimir Nabokov. Lectures in Russian Literature
Eric Newby - The Big Red Train
Eric Newby - A Book of Travller's Tales
Eric Newby - A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Eric Newby - Slowly Down the Ganges
Eric Newby - A Small Place in Italy
Eric Newby - A Traveller's Life
John Cowper Powys - Autobiography
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
Damon Runyon - On Broadway
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie - Shame
Robert Sabbag - Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade
Oliver Sacks - Awakenings (ALSO: .......)
Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Price Was High
Josef Skvorecky - The Brass Saxophone
Hunter S. Thompson - Generation of Swine
Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter
Robert van Over - Smearing the Ghost's Face with Ink
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Green House
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Time and the Hero
Peter Wahloo - The Lorry
Marina Warner - Alone of All Her Sex: The Myths and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
Edmund White - A Boy's Own Story
Tom Wolfe - The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe - The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby
Damon Runyon on Broadway
containing all the stories from More Than Somewhat, Furthermore [and] Take It Easy
by Damon Runyon
London: Pan, 1975 (Picador Books)
Paperback. 573 pages.
" 'Seeing Brooklyn I get to thinking of certain parties over there that I figure must be suffering terribly from the unemployment situation . . . because if nobody is working and making any money, there is nobody for them to rob, and if there is nobody for them to rob, Harry the Horse and Spanish John and Little Isadore are just naturally bound to be feeling the depression keenly.'
Find out what happens on Broadway, the hardened artery of New York life, when Waldo Winchester takes a peek at Dave the Dude's doll, drops in for the phonus bolonus and gets the leather from Dave . When Ickey the Pig is not so tickled when he plays stuss with Rusty Charley... when John Wangle happens to be on Broadway with two bloodhounds. . . or when Tobias Tweeney is tossed about by his ever-loving doll and Joe Trivett punches him in the snoot...
Here are all the bootleggery, banditry and bawdiness of Runyon's famous guys and dolls on Broadway."
Source: Cover blurb
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