Thank you for the welcome!! When I originally began reading MAD as a kid (around 7 years old) I continued to read and I guess collect the magazines intermittently until well into High School. The funny thing is that I never bought any of the paperbacks. It wasn't until I was 20 years old that I began collecting MAD again. A couple of years later I had bought a few MAD paperbacks at a yard sale and that is where it all started. I am 38 now and there are still a small handful of US cover variations (that I know of) that I still need. My favorites are the Warner issue of "Howling MAD" and "Self-Made MAD", "MAD Sucks", "Monster MAD", "Invisible MAD", and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. MAD". I grew up on the Universal and Hammer horror films, so the mix of the 2 have always been my favorites.
The foreign books were tricky. The first I had read about them was in Grant's "Collectibly MAD." But...there was no list. Then, I saw a few foreign cover scans on Collectmad.com. It has taken me well over 8 years to just about finish most of my foreign paperback collections. Believe it or not, most of what I have found was by pure accident and not even through eBay. Eventually I became the "go-to guy" (for lack of a better term) when it came to paperbacks among some of the MAD collectors.
At last count, there were paperbacks published in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland (Netherlands), Hungary, Italy, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan (bootleg copies), Turkey, and the U.K. There have been rumors amongst many of the major collectors as to whether paperbacks were published in Greece, but none of us have seen them. Some countries, like Brazil, have taken paperback material and used it as Specials or odd-sized books. Some have even created their own variations of paperbacks by combining cartoons from various sources to make a brand new book.
I tried to add a photo but I can't figure out how to do it. Any advice or instruction would be appreciated.