Mr Men and Little Miss series; number order is not tallying

I'm going through my kids' books in this account and currently working on the Mr. Men and Little Miss series. We have the sets where, if you put them in order on the shelf, the spines (except for more recently written books) form the words 'My Mr Men Library' and 'My Little Miss Library'. They all have numbers on the spines to put them in the correct order. Our books are published by Egmont from the UK and I assume are the original versions.

 

(not my photos, but you get the idea)

I noticed that some of the books in the series listing on LibraryThing have different numbers. The notice at the end of the Mr Men series page says that the numbering comes from Wikipedia and it does seem to tie in - although I haven't checked most of the books since there is no numbered list (I think there used to be?); rather, you have to go through character by character and see which ones mention a number. I don't know what source Wikipedia used to get their numbers. I have googled but am unable to find an 'official' source for the numbering. Maybe the difference in numbers is due to different series by UK and USA publishers?

Should I change the numbers/ leave them alone/ create a UK series or what? It feels odd to have the books in what (to me) is the wrong order.

This is a more recent picture from the internet (Egmont is now Farshore) of the back of a Little Miss books with the characters in order:



Little Miss Giggles should be number 7 but is number 14 in the LT list and Little Miss Twins should be number 12 but is 15 in the LT list.

I think it would suit a Publisher Series for your numbering – and also then you don't need to worry about the books that are in the main series, but aren't in the numbered set, because you can just not include them in the Publisher Series. Then if different publishers have their own orderings that differ, the same can be added for any of those too. FYI I have seen some 1970-80s UK editions that didn't have numbers or the spine graphics at all, so they are definitely a later thing.

Edit: and then, maybe the main Series that holds all the books could be set simply into publication date order, instead of including the numbers that might have variations or only apply to modern editions?

>3 Nevov: Thanks. I'll take a look at creating a Publisher series for them.

I'm not sure if publication date order would mess up the main series; I looked at dates and they seem to have been published about 4 per year. If I sort the current series by publication year, the numbers go all over the place :0)