Being that she turned 90 in 2020, it seems fitting to take some time to appreciate Nancy Drew. Since 1930, who hasn’t grown up reading some (if not all) of the Nancy Drew Detective Series? As I (Julia) spoke about on the first episode of our podcast, Nancy Drew has a very special place in my heart and my bookshelf.
Ever since bringing the first book home from the library when I was in elementary school I’ve been hooked. I collect old Nancy Drew books to this day and scour used book store shelves and boxes of old books at vintage sales. In my opinion, the older the book the better. It feels like I’m holding a little piece of history in my hands that I get to honor and cherish.
One reason Nancy Drew is so appealing to me is that she was so independent, smart, and brave that I aspired to be just like her. Harriet Adams, the daughter of the creator of the Nancy Drew stories, revised all of the stories to have a more modern feeling in the 1950’s and wrote all of the new stories during that time right up until her death in 1982. Mrs. Adams made some significant changes to the character when she took the helm: she changed Nancy’s age from 16-18, she made her able to drive, and she changed her relationship with Hannah Gruen.
As Mrs. Adams told the Associated Press in 1980: “[i]f I made Nancy liberated, I was unconscious of the fact. She’s like me. I know what I was writing about. She isn’t artificial. She’s a modern young woman – the best of the modern young women.” I couldn’t agree more or express why I was so drawn to this character while I was growing up.
If you collect Nancy Drew books like I do, you probably have noticed they come in different versions. This is due to the fact of when the book was published. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, when the books were originally published, the boards of the book itself were blue and they came with a paper dust jacket. Between the decades, however, the silhouette of the titular character changed to have an updated look for the new decade. These blue boarded books were the norm until the 1960’s when they switched to another updated look and changed to matte picture covers and were used until the late 1980’s. By 1987, the glossy yellow picture covers that are still used today and have become the signature of the series.
Do you collect Nancy Drew Mystery Stories? It’s like Pokemon, gotta catch ‘em all! I simplified the list of all the ways that you can tell the age of a Nancy Drew book, each of them are treasures and an excellent addition to your library. As the Associated Press explained in 1998, “[t]hese books [Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys] set out to give kids an essential moral core of values…Through the messages they set out to communicate to children, Nancy and the Hardy Boys are role models in a very real way.”
Let’s read, share, repeat and happy sleuthing!
Sibling Library 