The next new paperback published was The Specter from the Magician’s Museum (Puffin, March 2001), initially published in hardcover back in 1998 (Dial). Puffin went a new direction on the cover (shown bottom row, left, in image). No longer were the titles displayed in unique fonts across the upper third and superimposed over the artwork. Now there was a band of color across the top fourth of the cover for the author and title, each in a standardized (wanna-be creepy-ish looking?) font.
Replacing Bart Goldman on illustrator duties was Brett
Helquist, best known for his work on the Series of Unfortunate Events.
At some point after Specter, Puffin began redressing the previous books in the series. This is where paying attention to the printing number becomes important.
For example, a copy of the 21st printing of The House with
a Clock in its Walls (Puffin, 1993) shows the initial cover. By the 25th printing, House now displayed
the new style shown on Specter (shown top row, left, in image). Soon
thereafter, the new style began trickling down across the series:
- The Figure in the Shadows (Puffin, 1993) still used the old-style for a 16th printing, but used the new style by the 19th printing (top row, middle, in image)
- The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring (Puffin, 1993) used the new style by the 18th printing (top row, right, in image)
- The Ghost in the Mirror (Puffin, 1994) used the old-style for a 10th printing, but used the new style by the 17th printing (middle row, left, in image).
The key thing here is we don’t know the specific dates of
these later printings
We do know The House with a Clock in its Walls-The Ghost in the Mirror flipbook used the new style for its two covers when it was published
in 2002.
The next new paperbacks published were The Beast under the
Wizard’s Bridge (Puffin, March 2002) and The Tower at the End of the World (Puffin, Aug. 2003). Beast again featured Helquist artwork, but
Tower featured a mirror image of its original hardcover edition (Dial, 2001), created by S.
D. Schindler.
And this is roughly when the new style fizzled. There were nine Barnavelt titles in paperback
by this point: 6 in the old style and 7 in the new style, with only 4 issued in
both. The Vengeance of the Witch-finder (Dial, 1993) and The Doom of the Haunted Opera (Dial, 1995) were the two to never appear in the new style
that we’ve seen. (Have an edition in the new style? Send us some scans of the cover and copyright page, please.)
Why? Puffin told Ann
La Pietra 15+ year ago Doom was going out of print “because the book was selling less than
2,000 copies a year,” according to one of our blog’s earliest
new posts. With no one buying the
1998 paperback edition of Doom, what point was there in reissuing a revised cover in
2002-03? This also seems the motivation
to keep the Barnavelt series after The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost (Dial, 2003)
from ever appearing in paperback at all.
A year later, in Aug. 2004, Puffin reissued “the ten top-selling titles” in paperback, featuring yet another updated cover style. You will note the first titles in the Barnavelt series are part of this list, meaning those three have another (a third) paperback edition. This new style would also eventually carry over to two hardcover editions: The House where Nobody Lived (Dial, 2006) and The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer (Dial, 2008).
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