Day 88: Books, Books and More Books Part Two - Teenage Sleuths

When I was around 8 years old, I received a Nancy Drew book for Christmas. This very one in fact.

 The late 60s versions of the series were very formulaic. Each one had twenty chapters and similar introductions of the main characters. Nancy's friend Bess was plump and pretty, and George was "boyish". They each had a loyal boyfriend - no break-ups or partner swapping ever happened - and the only thing I remember about Ned Nickerson, Nancy's beau, is that he was pretty boring. Bess's squeeze was described as "husky."

Here I have identified the various volumes in the inside cover art:

 Early 60s versions had different inside cover pages:

And 1950s volumes had this:

 
 There was a used book store next to the local movie theater (still there, miraculously) in Gardena, and this is where I purchased all my older Nancy Drew books, for a quarter each. It took a while, but I managed to obtain the whole series.

Do you think I should contact poor Paula Simon?
 

Here she put her name on Nancy's sweater!



There's the price...

 If the 1930s versions are worth something, I have devalued this edition by stapling my initials on the cover.

Here's the inside cover of a 30s version. I much preferred the older books. They were about 50 pages longer and had 25 chapters as opposed to 20. Sometimes the stories were vastly different; they were all formulaic, but there was more plot variation in the original versions. Plus some interesting language. Nancy drove a roadster, ate luncheon, and said "to-day" .

Only the 1930s versions had illustrations:

 This was the first Nancy Drew book.

Here I am, stapling my initials again!

There was another series called Trixie Belden. Trixie was a bit younger at age 13. She was a bit of a tomboy and I remember in one book Trixie's mother took her to a department store to be fitted for her first girdle. This gave me nightmares, even though I weighed about 70 pounds. Anyway there were three different versions (eras) of TB books, and two different authors. The early books were progressive, not really formulaic at all. But they were rewritten when they were reissued in the seventies, and everything became much shorter and more like Nancy Drew.

I somehow collected the entire series, at least up to 1970, in the various formats. I just looked it up, and there were 39 books in all. Here are mine in order; the first volume is a first edition apparently.