Who was J. Oval?

No one seems to be sure.  In the 50s and 60s, the covers of several Pan paperbooks were credited to “J. Oval.”  While almost every source that I’ve found seems to agree that J. Oval was a pseudonym, there does not seem to be much agreement on who the real J. Oval was or even whether or not there was actually only one artist using the J. Oval name.  The most convincing argument that I’ve found online was at Little Owl Ski, where a good case was made that J. Oval was a British illustrator named Ben Ostrick.

Regardless of who he was in the real life, J. Oval was prolific and talented cover artist.  Here are a few of his covers: