Favourite Vintage Book Series Collected

Posted April 9, 2024 by Brin in Memes, Top Ten Tuesday / 3 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is an awesome meme previously hosted by the lovely folks @ The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl

favourite Vintage Book Series Collected

This week’s prompt is a freebie topic which means I am going to revert to form and talk about… some of my favourite vintage young adult (YA) book series that I have collected over the years. I’m going to spin this a little differently though and talk about some of my favourite series (or imprints) that were written by various authors rather than a singular author. Some of these are actual series, others are standalone stories within a certain imprint or publisher (which was very common in the 1980s/1990s to have books launched under a branch imprint).

I really wanted to include one of my favourite obscure(ish) series Nowhere High but as far as I am aware it was written by a single author Jesse Maguire – although that can be misleading as YA book series in the 1980s/1990s were often credited to a pseudonym e.g. ‘Nicholas Adams’ but was often various authors writing under the same name.

There were also creator’s such as Francine Pascal whose Sweet Valley High series was written by many ghostwriters under the name pen name ‘Kate William’ or Ann M. Martin who did write the early Babysitter’s Club books but later employed ghostwriters (whilst still being credited as the author). YA was, for sure, a wild place back in the day!!

Jesse Maguire is allegedly (according to Goodreads anyway!) to be a pseudonym for author Sherwood Smith but I can’t say for any great certainty. However, for the purpose of this post I decided to assume it was just one author (Sherwood Smith or otherwise) and therefore it has not been included. 🙁

1. Pan Horizons

Pan Horizons was an imprint of Pan Macmillan and released 72 books in total (I think I’ve counted them all correctly!) between 1986 and 1991. The covers were very distinct – mostly white with illustrations on the early books and photos in some later titles. I have made it a mission to collect all of them and currently only missing two: Everything is Not Enough by Sandy Asher and Me and Luke by Audrey O’Hearn.

I’ve been on the hunt for these for a couple of years with little success so I doubt my collection will ever be fully complete but I live in hope! (plus there are a couple that had newer editions with different cover art etc. that I haven’t been able to track them all down as yet).

The imprint boasts various popular authors of the time such as Lois Duncan, Judy Blume, Norma Klein, M.E. Kerr, Richard Peck and Sandra Scoppettone (whose YA books are severely under-rated in my humble opinion) plus many other known writers.

2. Chrystal Falls

A much shorter series (only seven books!) but it still counts as the seven entries were written by various auhors such as Meredith Hill (a pseudonym for Mary Francis Shura, incidentally), Candice Ransom, Caroline B. Cooney, and Diane Hoh.

I managed to track down all of the book fairly easily (thank you Thrift Books!) although the last book was a little bit trickier. I’m glad I was able to get them at the time (approximately ten years ago) as they are quite rare now and the final entry is near impossible to get at a decent price (if it can be gotten at all!)

I’ve yet to read them (shocker, I know) so I’m not too sure if they have a proper ending (or if the series was ended due to not being very popular, I can’t find all that much information about the reasons for it being such a short series, at least by the YA standards of the day) but if I ever do find out you can bet I’ll probably write about it here on my blog. 😉

3. Point Horror

The granddaddy (or gold standard haha) of YA series has to be the Point Horror (PH) imprint (although interestingly it was only branded as such in the UK – in the US it was released just under ‘Point’). PH was launched by Scholastic Inc. in 1991 but included titles that were previously released earlier and has 103 books (not including spin-offs).

R.L. Stine, Richie Tankersley Cusick, Diane Hoh, Carol Ellis, Caroline B. Cooney are just a few of the authors who released books under the PH banner and it ran for well over a decade (including it’s various offshoots like Nightmare Hall, Point Horror: Unleashed, and Mutant Point Horror). As YA horror faded, so too did the series even though it did make a brief comeback about a decade ago.

The books were campy fun, not really terribly scary (at least not to this teen who was already obsessed with Christopher Pike and Stephen King books!) but were engaging and good for people first dipping their toes into the horror genre. I don’t tend to read a lot of horror now but I’m very nostalgic for this series and have spent a good bit of time collecting the various books and offshoots (I probably have about 90% of the main titles, all of the Nightmare Hall books, maybe 50% of the Unleashed and none of the Mutant ones – they were released a bit after I’d moved on from the series!)

4. Nightmares

This is another British imprint (though the books were released under various other publishers within the US) issued by Lions (Harper Collins). According to online sources there were 41 books released by various authors such as T.S. Rue (pen name of Todd Strasser), Bebe Faas Rice, Robert Hawks, L.J. Smith, and Nicholas Adams (yes THAT Nicholas Adams mentioned above haha!) to name just a few.

To be completely honest, I think I preferred the Nightmare series to PH (don’t shoot me!), it seemed a bit more mature at the time and a couple of books from the series are firm favourites of mine to this day (Horrorscope especially).

I collected this series for a couple of years and completed in about six years ago (including the bind-ups!) I think it was actually the first vintage series I fully completed which is pretty cool.

5. Point Romance

Another YA series put out by Scholastic Inc. in the UK (though this time focussing on romance as opposed to horror) featuring authors such as Caroline B. Cooney, Jane Claypool-Miner, Mary Francis Shura, and Alison Creaghan to name but a few, over 30-odd books.

I haven’t read all of its titles (though I have read a fair few) but my favourite was always the Saturday Night books by Caroline B. Cooney which were a mini-series of books featuring the same protagonists over several key dances/events. They were cute, fluffy, and engaging, and I loved getting swept up in them!

I have pretty much all of the books, there is still one singular book I need to get (though I own it in one of the bind-ups) that I should probably get before it becomes as rare as hen’s teeth! The covers are certainly a trip and always make me smile.

6. Sweet Dreams

Another romance imprint! This one was put out by Bantam Books and is one of the most prolific series coming in at a whopping 232 books (plus I believe a couple of the main entry books has a couple of spin-offs as well, not sure if that’s included in the total). They were released between 1981 to 1995 so definitely one of the longest running on this list.

The Sweet Dreams series were books that pretty much guaranteed a happy ending (except for the first book, oddly enough) and I think were probably akin to something like Mills and Boon for adults. They weren’t deep but they didn’t have to be – most were pretty inoffensive and passed away a couple of hours!

I started collecting these again probably about fifteen years ago and honestly doubt I will ever fully complete the set (some of the more recent are super-hard to get or very expensive if you do find them) but I probably own at least half of them (with many duplicates – such is the life of a book collector!)

7. Caitlin

This series is actually contrived of three trilogies: the Love, Promise, and Forever trilogies following young Caitlin Ryan from her teenage years to early adulthood. Created by Francine Pascal, the first trilogy was written by Joanna Campbell, whilst the next two were written by Diana Gregory. Not as big a hit as SV franchise, I actually found this smaller series to be at times even more entertaining (if you think Jessica Wakefield is bad, she has nothing on Caitlin Ryan!!)

I started collecting these books years ago but it’s only been in the last couple of years that I finally managed to track them all down because I wanted to collect all the editions available! I have four different versions of the first series – the illustrated editions (with and without window) plus the two photo editions that were released (I think one was only released in the UK and Australia). The only version I don’t have is the bind-up (with who I’m pretty sure is Yasmine Bleeth on the cover!)

I have also the US and UK editions of the second and third trilogies (plus the UK bind-ups). So quite a few editions haha! I originally only wanted to get the UK versions but I got a mixed bunch at first which made me determined to complete all sets (plus I was keen to get the set I had as a teenager that I stupidly gave away!!)

8. Puffin Plus

Puffin Plus is an interesting imprint because it was apparently originally created to let parents know that these books were for older readers (teens basically). This series boasted many authors such as Lois Duncan, Margaret Mahy, Jean Ure, Marilyn Kaye, and Robert Westall (it would take forever to list them all – there are a lot!)

I do remember a lot of the books being mature (plus they had quite a lot of British writers as opposed to solely American authors) which was great for teen me as I could relate to these stories a lot more.

I have a fair few of these books but nowhere near completing the collection anytime soon. I remain on the lookout for ones I don’t own though… 🙂

9. Methuen Teens

The Teens imprint was put out by Methuen Publishing during the 1980s-1990s and included author’s such as K.M. Peyton, Margaret Mahy, Norma Fox Mazer, Anthony Masters, and Andre Norton. They had colourful covers (a mix of illustration and photographic) and somewhat more mature themes. They veered from contemporary to fantasy, historical to poetry, and had some really strong titles.

I don’t have as many of these as I would like, my unicorn book for this series is definitely Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones but that is super-expensive these days (to be expected after the very popular Studio Ghibli anime adaptation). Definitely a series that should be way more popular!

10. Teen Tracks

Lions Teen Tracks, much like Methuen Teens, was a series that varied in genres; contemporary, fantasy, science fiction – they were game for anything. Authors such as Louise Lawrence, Jacqueline Wilson, Robert Cormier, Cynthia Voigt, Paul Zindel, and Mollie Hunter lent their talent to this series and I remember seeing these books with their distinctive stylised covers in my local library and bookshops as a young teen. It’s hard to get a definitive list of how many books were published under this imprint but I would hazard a guess to it being a lot haha!

I started collecting these pretty much by accident (a book I ordered came as Teen Tracks edition when it wasn’t listed as such) but it jogged my memory of reading and enjoying most of these titles when I was younger so it made sense to start collecting them again. I am more lazily collecting these (not actively searching but if I see any I definitely purchase) so it’s slow going but rewarding.

Bonus: Sunfire

I would be remiss not to briefly mention the Sunfire series, released by Scholastic in the 1980s and featuring protagonists from various points in history. It was unusual series in that it was wholly historical romance (there were a fewer shorter YA historical romance series) that ran for 32 books from author’s such as Mary Francis Shura, Willo Davis Roberts, Vivian Schurfranz, Jane Claypool Miner, Candice F. Ransom, and Jeffie Ross Gordon.

I was able to collect these books very quickly (over the period of a few months) years ago and still have them sitting on my shelves unread (but hopefully not for long!)