Someone… well, a group of good folks… sent me a copy of the new edition of Home is On Top of a Dog House, part of a line of reprints of the Happiness is a Warm Puppy series of books. Now, I’d noticed that they’d done cover redesigns form the original, but I hadn’t realized that they were redesigning the innards. Usually, redesigns of something like this would create something more ornate, but this one went the other way around, stripping away the aggressive design of the 1960s original, going for simpler text, less color, remove the framing of the images.

Now me, I’m always rather liked the Determined Productions aesthetics, which I thought went a long way toward making these brief books interesting objects. However, that design has been used on reissues in the not-too-distant past, from the same publisher as this new edition, Cider Mill Press. This doesn’t erase those copies from existence, so I’ve got zero problem with it. But I still prefer the older one. (Although I prefer this to the 1980s expansion/rework.)

There is one move here I find a little odd: they changed the title. Well, kinda. While the title page inside uses the term “Dog House” as with earlier editions, the front cover uses “Doghouse”, no space – and because of the design they used, that term appears a half dozen times across the cover.

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