Reprints of the first 5 books feature Barnabas on the cover, though he's not in them. That must have disappointed a lot of kids! He's even fanged in one, sigh.
It certainly disappointed me at first. But then as I started reading them, I found that I didn't really miss him. And then after he finally did show up, it wasn't like he was written the same way that he was on the show, anyway. And increasingly the storylines began to make less and less sense with him popping up in all sorts of time periods in the past, yet, unless I'm forgetting any instances, no one in those time periods had ever heard of a Barnabas Collins prior to his appearance in their time! But then I came to think that the only way to read those books and stay sane was to take each one as a self-contained story and not to try to think of them in any way as a connected storyline.