Thursday, January 14, 2010

A Complete Matte Blue Spine Hardy Boys Set


Despite the picture, my two year old nephew Caleb is not quite ready to read the Hardy Boys yet. At two, though obviously brilliant and a handsome rascal like his uncle, there is some time before he will venture into the wonderful world of series books.
As his uncle, I certainly feel responsible to insure that he will be indulging in quality reading, so I have a plan. I want to put together for him a nice set of blue spine matte Hardy Boys books. That complete set will represent books 1-58 with as many original text books that this format allows. I'm hoping to find good copies that have held up well over the years. Nice quality copies from the 1960's and 70's would be ideal. I'll have to figure out how many have the tan endpages versus black and white endpages. I've only casually looked on Ebay, and I admit to feeling a little overwhelmed. It seems that many sellers of Hardy Boys books do not give good descriptions as to printing year or to book listing. Somehow yellow spine Nancy Drews seem to be identified better on Ebay.
Does anyone have any collecting tips for me before I start on this venture? I think we have some time before Caleb finishes The Disappearing Floor so I welcome your advice.

4 comments:

  1. I believe that the first printing PCs list to Desert Giant on the back cover and that those books have the brown and white endpapers. I'm not sure offhand how many titles have the brown and white endpapers, but it should be most of them up to around Desert Giant.

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  2. Jack,
    Don't know how much fun you're looking to have with this, but I could easily send you darn near all of them for $3 brown ep, $2 white ep, plus a bit of postage.

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  3. Caty,

    What kind of condition are we talking? I want little Caleb to have nice copies!

    Jennifer-
    Thanks for that tip...Desert Giant would be the earliest printings?

    This is what I love about this hobby... always something to learn, and great people to meet along the way.

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  4. I have an older printing of Hardy and Hardy Investigations, and I thumbed through it. The first PCs list to Desert Giant on the back cover and have the brown endpapers. Desert Giant is the last PC to have brown endpapers.

    Of course the first PCs of the early titles like #1 have the revised text and brown endpapers. The Hardys pretty much follow the same pattern as the Nancy Drew books. Some of the Hardy Boys PCs have the $1 box just like the Nancy Drew books. The difference with the Hardys is that some of the $1 box PCs command much higher prices.

    I will either email you a list of the people doing the promo or you can get the list from my blog on Monday. I will be reminding people about the promo this weekend and will check the chat boxes late Sunday or early Monday to make sure they are doing the promo.

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