BiblioFile: Puffin Publishes Monday

And now, a few words on the paperback editions of the Anthony Monday series from the 1990s.

Bantam Skylark published the first three books of the four-book Anthony Monday series in the 1980s. The final book, The Mansion in the Mist (Dial, 1992), was published posthumously. In 1993, Mansion was the second book published in paperback by Puffin Books.  The first was 1992's The Secret of the Underground Room. Both 1992's Secret and 1993's Mansion used the Edward Gorey-created covers from the original Dial hardcover editions with minor changes, including coloring the titles, adding additional promotional text, and including a bar across the top to show it was a Puffin Book. The earlier Bantam Skylark versions with Gorey's art had reduced and centered the illustration on a field of color. Instead, Puffin just reused it full-size.

Time passed. New Lewis Barnavelt books were released in the early-to-mid 1990s, prompting those paperback editions to match. A new Johnny Dixon book arrived in 1994, and Puffin decided to utilize another illustrator for its paperback edition. Somewhere along the way, Puffin chose to redress the Monday series, too.

The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn and The Dark Secret of Weatherend arrived in 1997 and The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb followed in 1999. These three editions featured a rectangle atop a colorful background of either aqua, navy, or purple. The irregularly-shaped rectangle, shaped somewhat like a page torn from a book, includes the title in a tall, thin font. Below the title was a tilted square image, superimposed between the title and rectangle. The images are scenes of the artwork created for the original Dial hardcovers for Dark and Lamp, and the 1985 Bantam paperback for Treasure. Recall Judith Gwyn Brow, not Gorey, illustrated the original hardcover of Treasure for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

In keeping with each series having a uniform look, Puffin redressed the paperback edition of Mansion sometime in the late 1990s. No specific date is known, and one must rely on print run numbers for a sense of when covers changed. A 9th printing shows the new, post-1997 style. One thing to note about the Mansion redress is the new paperback obverse shows the original reverse of the Dial hardcover (1992). One may guess a book with a mansion in its title might be better served showing a mansion on its cover, instead of someone rummaging in a wooden box.

And there they are. The Monday series ended at four books, and, 20-plus years later, these Puffin editions are the most recently-released English version of these titles in paperback.