YOUNGER COLLECTOR JANE MB EXPLAINS how she got interested in collecting: Nancy Drew has been around since 1930. But I, having read a couple of the books as a little girl, only began collecting the books a few years ago. In that short time, I’ve come to realise why Nancy is such an icon for girls and women.
Nancy Drew PC games led back to books
I began playing the Nancy Drew PC games (published by the company, Her Interactive), in 2008, and from there I began reading the books that the games were based upon.
At first, I began reading to see what was similar in the books and games. In some cases, there were few differences and in other cases, the game company had taken small parts of the books and written the rest of the plots themselves.
What she liked in the books
Soon, I got hooked on reading the books for the mysteries and for how Nancy tackles each challenge she faces.
There are many different series and I enjoy reading all of the different ones because they put Nancy in interesting situations. For instance, a very short series focused on Nancy attending University. While it’s not as good as the other series, it was quite interesting to see how Nancy and her friends face the challenges of being on their own, dating or studying or working and handling life crises without the help of their parents. In another later series, the “Mystery Files” (a series that was more mature and included murder), Nancy deals with extremely dangerous people who have murdered, and at the same time, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend and meets other guys. All of the different series show a different side to Nancy and who she is as a person.
Collecting hardcovers v paperbacks
I own a large number of the hardcover ones, and the paperback ones. The hardcovers – what is considered the original 56 Nancy Drew books – are very popular, and occasionally I come across them in second-hand bookshops or in Op shops. They can be quite hard to find.
But the paperbacks can be even harder since they’re not as popular. I have tended towards collecting the paperbacks because I enjoy the challenge of trying to find them. Sometimes I buy them online, but mostly I try and find them in second-hand bookshops.
Missy says
Hi Jane,
Thanks for this post. It reminded me of my obsession in collecting old Nancy Drew books as a child and how unpopular they were at the time (it was the era of Babysitters Club and Goosebumps – 1990s). I got into the stories of Nancy through my mum who was a fan as a girl in the 50s. She bought me my first Nancy Drew (112 – Crime in the Queens Court) in 1993, the year it was first published. Nancy Drew had had a resurgence in America at that time and new titles were being developed. Some of these paperbacks made it to Dymocks but as I said earlier were not very popular and so are the ones you are finding difficult to collect.
I soon became obsessed and read every ND at my local library. Most of their copies dated to the 1970s and had not been borrowed for some time. I soon loved the original stories and the weird ones written about UFOs and the like in the late 1960s. I began collecting at every opportunity. My favourites to find were the Collins British reprints for the Australian market in the 1950s. These often had a name inscribed on the fly cover (like your example above of Secret of the Old Clock). It was nice to know that they had once been cherished by young girls generations before myself. They had wonderfully colourful covers and I note you do not have a photo of one. I imagine they are terribly hard to find now as they were real challenges then. Interestingly the books are numbered in different orders in America/Canada vs England/Australia. This confusing detail means that it is hard to store the books in correct order when one has copies of the same title with different publish origins and hence different numbers.
There was another edition of a paperback ND that I never found again. It had an image on the cover of a staged photograph instead of an illustration. It was an original story but was published sometime in the late 1970s in America. I believe that print run to be the rarest of them all and would be very interested to hear if you ever find one in your search. I only ever saw another one in the collection of a regional library.
Good luck collecting. I am so pleased to know that it is an enduring obsession.
Kind regards,
MIssy (NSW)