The Guesswork in Guides

Several excellent collector guides exist for juvenile series books.  The most well-known guides are Farah's Guide for the Nancy Drew books and Hardy and Hardy Investigations for the Hardy Boys books.   The guides are not perfect; all of them involve some guesswork, and as a result, revised editions correct mistakes and omissions from older editions.

Some people may wonder exactly how the authors figure out the sequence of the printings.  There are many factors involved, and I am going to discuss some of them in this post.  My comments will discuss certain printings from Farah's Guide.

The points for the first printing of The Thirteenth Pearl have changed since earlier editions of Farah's Guide.   Previously, the first printing was stated to be a book with The Triple Hoax as the next book notice on page 178 as opposed to later printings that have The Secret of the Old Clock as the next book.  Then it was noticed that some of the books have The Triple Hoax in italics while others have it in plain text.  The books are identical in all other ways, so which came first?

This is where Farah made an educated guess.   It makes more sense that the printing that came first is the one in which The Triple Hoax is in plain text, since this was clearly a mistake.  In the second printing, Grosset and Dunlap would have corrected the mistake so that the title was in italics.  It makes far less sense to think that the title was in italics in the first printing and then changed to plain text in the second printing.  So, even though there is no proof as to which book came first, Farah deduced that the book with the plain text "next book" notice is the earlier one.

Guesswork is also involved in the points for the first printing of The Clue of the Dancing Puppet.  The first printing of this book lists to #38 on the back cover and to #39 inside the book.  Some of the first printing books are 18 mm thick while others are 21 mm thick.  Farah has deduced that the 18 mm version is earlier than the 21 mm version.  So, how does he know that the less thick books were printed first since there is nothing else different about the books aside from the thickness?

Take the early picture cover printings of The Bungalow Mystery as an example.  The first picture cover printing, 1962A-71, which has the $1 suggested price box on the front cover, is 19 mm thick.  The second picture cover printing, 1962B-72, which has the blackened suggested price box on the front cover, is also 19 mm thick.  The fourth picture cover printing, 1963B-74, is 22.5 mm thick.

The early picture cover printings of The Mystery at Lilac Inn follow a similar pattern.  The first picture cover printing, 1962A-88, which has the $1 suggested price box on the front cover, is 19 mm thick.  The second picture cover printing, 1962B-89, which has the blackened suggested price box on the front cover, is 20 mm thick.   The fourth picture cover printing, 1963B-91, is 23 mm thick.

The other early picture cover books that I have follow the same type pattern.   The books printed in 1962 are 19 mm thick while the books printed in 1963 are around 22-23 mm thick.  This is why Farah can state with reasonable certainly that the first printings of The Clue of the Dancing Puppet that are 19 mm thick came before the ones that are 21 mm thick.  It is just a matter of observation and applying those observations to other books in the series.

There are some instances in which Farah has no way to deduce which book came first.  For the first printing of The Secret of Mirror Bay, some of the books have the Nancy Drew picture on the back cover overprinted with yellow while the rest of the books have the picture in the usual black and gray tones.   All that is known is that the books with the yellow overprint are much more scarce, and therefore, more valuable.   The yellow overprint is a mistake that occurred at some point during the print run.  It could be that the yellow overprint books came first, but there is no way of deducing whether this is true.   It could simply have been caused by a machine malfunction during the first printing and could have occurred at any point during the print run.

Any collector can make observations such as these, and the observations can easily be applied to other series that do not have collector guides.  When I created my Beverly Gray formats page recently, I used what I already knew about the other Grosset and Dunlap series in order to draw conclusions about the Beverly Gray books.  All of the Grosset and Dunlap series went through similar changes in format at about the same time.  While collector guides do not exist for many series, they are not completely necessary if one owns a guide for either Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys and applies the information to the other Grosset and Dunlap series books.