Another Grosset and Dunlap Myth

1961 Rare Nancy Drew BOOKS $1 BOX Vintage OLD Gifts Item #330295999541

The auction is for a picture cover of Fire Dragon that has the $1 box printed as part of the front cover. The seller states:

"it is part of the book and cannot be removed. And Therein was the problem. Retailers couldn’t jack the price, and they hated it.. This brilliant idea was quickly halted and the ‘idea-man’ still works in the mail room to this day. Only a handfull of volumes were printed this way...just try to find another!"

Then why did Grosset and Dunlap make it a practice from the 1970s and continuing to the present day to actually print the price on the back cover of all of its books? It is quite common to find Nancy Drew books from the 1970s and 1980s that have the price covered by a gray box with a new price printed off to the side. If printing the price on the book was such a bad thing, why did they keep doing it later? Why are they still doing it? All stores have to do is put a sticker over the price that is printed on the book.

The $1 box editions quickly were halted because the price increased past $1. Since Grosset and Dunlap still prints the prices on their books, I doubt that the reason was solely because retailers did not want the price on the books. The main point of the seller's story is to add interest to the listing.

As to whether only a handful of copies were printed, I doubt it. Each book that had a $1 box appears to have had an entire print run with the price box on the cover. By Kingsport press file copies that I have seen from the early 1970s, each printing of each Nancy Drew book had around 10,000 copies. It is quite likely that the $1 box books had as high of a print run as any other printing.

The books are scarce, but they can be found. I have one of each in my collection, and I know I have had extras of several of them. The seller stated to "just try to find another," but I have had duplicates. The number of copies that come up for sale is a bit low, but I have seen them often enough that it is a stretch to imply that a buyer is not going to be able to find another. The examples that come up for sale are usually in rough shape, so the more likely reason as to why so few copies are around is that most of them may have been destroyed by wear and tear.