Something About Puffin Paperbacks in the 1990s

Auk words.

I found an email from a fan with the handle "gloomy gus" asking what year the Edward Gorey art was replaced on paperback editions:

Huge Bellairs and Gorey fan. I am looking to buy a friend's child copies of the books I loved when I was a kid, but I feel the Gorey art is such a part of the book. Looking on Amazon I see a couple of different print years for the paperbacks. Does anyone have any info on when the art changed on the covers?

Yes.  In short, the cover images changed in the mid-1990s when Brad Strickland began writing new books in the Lewis Barnavelt and Johnny Dixon series. We've already touched on the Lewis Barnavelt paperback editions from the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.

I believe there were longer, more detailed posts on the Dixon and Monday series in the pipeline, so I'll dig those out and get them online soon. In the meantime:

• The Secret of the Underground Room (Puffin, 1992) included Gorey's artwork on the front cover.  Two years later, The Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie (Dial, 1994) was the first Johnny Dixon book Strickland completed. Puffin began a campaign two years after that to release the older Dixon titles, starting with The Curse of the Blue Figurine (Puffin, 1996) with cover art by Paul Zelinsky. Drum went paper two years later (Puffin, 1997) and titles kept coming until The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost (Puffin, 2001).
• The Mansion in the Mist (Puffin, 1993) was initially released with the full-size Gorey art shown on the hardcover (Dial, 1992). Starting in 1997, the other three books in the series were redesigned and reissued, ending with a redress of Mansion to match.  But Gorey's art still appears on these.