Building a Collection

I have been building a Nancy Drew collection, and saw this as an interesting opportunity to get a book I needed at a better price, but still have a good copy in my collection.

I found a listing for a book with a split text block. Knowing it wasn't likely to be bid up due to the damage, I bought it. When it arrived, it was an easy fix for me after a number of repairs I've already done. I was thrilled to see the book in such good condition when it arrived. Really, it was just the split text block.

Unfortunately, the way to fix this is to peel up the end papers, then PVA the spine of the text block together, apply book repair tape and reaffix cover and text block. I'm happy with the result, and now have a readable copy of Nancy's Mysterious Letter that has a new lease on life.

NaNoWriMo 2019

It's November again, so I'm trying my hand again at writing a novel in a month. 50,000 words seems like such a daunting total, but it can be achieved fairly easily. I've succeeded three straight years, and this will be a fourth.

Thinking of the Hardy Boys can be very helpful. I just did a quick check, and the average line count in one of the books is 9, with 30 lines per page. A 200 page book yields 54,000 total words! So my goal for NaNoWriMo this year is to write a Hardy Boys book.

It has been a slow start since a storm knocked out power on the first, and it wasn't restored until late afternoon on the second… but I was able to write about 400 words on my phone the first day, and added 200 more on day two before the power came back. Since then, I've gotten my word count up to 5001, so I'm 1 word ahead of pace for the month!

I'm thinking about posting each chapter up on here as a blog entry as I finish it. That way you can read along with me as I write (assuming anyone actually reads any of these posts, lol). In any event, it gives me some convenient material to post on a daily (for the most part, anyway) basis. It will be nice to throw some content up here a bit more regularly.
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On another front, I'm still working on the video of my last major book repair. The audio got screwed up and didn't record, so I'm planning to run part of the video at double speed and record a VoiceOver explaining what I am doing as I go. This is at a standstill since the reason the audio got screwed up was because my headset bit the dust, and I need a new one.

I've been going through a number of my duplicates, and touching them up with PVA glue where the covers are starting to loosen from the text block. If I can fix these minor errors soon enough, I can keep these books from falling into the desperate condition I've been working on with titles so far. My original text copy of The Tower Treasure that I got at a yard sale for a quarter as a kid basically fell apart in my hands as I tried to mend it. In the end, I had to do more with it than any other so far. The front board actually fell off the spine as I was prepping the text block to get reattached. The outer cloth binding is basically rotted away. I used a strip of book repair tape on the inside of the cloth to hold it together, and some PVA inserted in the shoulder of the outer cloth to make sure it stuck down to the tape. It is back together, and I'll keep it for sentimental reasons, but I've got my eyes open for a better copy to replace it in my set.

I also have a picture cover copy of The Disappearing Floor in the original text that is coming apart in similar ways. I'm waiting to get a new headset for my computer, because that seems like a great candidate for another video attempt at repair. I may attempt a radical repair on it by trying to remove the boards entirely, glue a paper backing to the picture cloth in order to give it stability, then attach new boards and rebuild the cover of the book. It will be a real challenge and test of my ability, and I look forward to capturing it and sharing it with you.

I've begun reading through the Nancy Drew canon, and am very favorably impressed with the first three books. I found a really cheap copy of a later book in the series on eBay that had a split text block... Undaunted (after several successful repairs on Hardy Boys books), I scooped it up and will begin building (maybe literally) a set of Nancy Drews to share shelf space with the Hardy Boys. I'm looking forward to reading the book when it arrives, but almost as eagerly to doing the repairs on it to make it whole again!

Fixing Up Books

I ordered some mylar sleeves to put my dust jackets in to help protect them from damage. Reading up on how to use them most effectively, they mentioned using a bone folder to get a sharp crease. Intrigued, I decided to look into buying a bone folder as well.

That was my rabbit hole... When I found that a bone folder ran between 5 and 10 dollars, but that I could get a bookbinding starter kit with 2 bone folders for $16... well, that was an easy decision. Skipping over the YouTube tutorial videos and buying odds and ends from paint brushes to book repair tape, I decided to try my hand on repairing three of my Hardy Boys books. There were three different editions to work on, a brown endpaper House on the Cliff, a white endpaper House on the Cliff, and a silhouette edition of The Tower Treasure.

The white endpaper HC had split at the front. The text block was intact and connected to the back cover, but the front cover had completed separated from the text. The silhouette TT was basically in the same state, but had a gauze crash around the text block that was still attached to the front cover. The front cover was loose, but not fully separated from the text block yet. The brown endpaper HC was the most challenging. Its covers were still snugly connected to the text block, but the block itself was split in two pieces in the middle of the book.

I'm going to skim over the first two repairs, since I forgot to document them at all while I was working on them. For these, I scanned the endpaper artwork into the computer and printed new endpapers that I could fold and attach with PVA to the front and back of the text block. I removed both text blocks completely and cleared off the glue and gauze from the spine of them. Then I used the PVA to glue them together, and ultimately to glue the folded endpaper directly onto the boards of the cover. As you can see, the end result was a very snug fit for text and cover!

The third book was a challenge. I knew that I had no way to replace the original endpapers, so it was essential to save them. First, I separated cover from text block, then used PVA to reseal the text pages into one block, with the flyleaf attached at the front and back.

Once this was dry, I reinforced the spine of the text block with a section of book repair tape cut to the width of the spine. Then I placed a full width of book repair tape over the spine of the text block to glue into the covers.

To prep the covers, I had to carefully peel the endpapers up from the front and rear boards of the cover. I was (miraculously) able to do this with only some minor damage at one corner. Before placing the book repair tape across the spine, I had scored the backing paper on it with two lines at the width of the spine. Then I removed the central strip of backing paper and set the text block in place. I slipped the back flap of tape under the lifted endpaper on the rear cover, aligned the rear flyleaf image and rear endpaper so that they were just touching, and removed the backing paper from the back flap. I carefully pressed the endpaper flap onto the adhesive of the book repair tape.

After this, I applied PVA to the underside of this join of the rear endpapers, and pressed it down into place. I placed this in my jig to press it while it dried. For the front of the book, I first applied PVA to the underside of the front endpaper directly on the board of the cover. Then I slipped the front flap under the lifted front endpaper and aligned the front flyleaf with the front endpaper. Once the join was snug, I lifted the endpaper at one end while pinning it in place at the other, in order to remove the backing paper from the repair tape. Then I worked the two together and used the bone folder to smooth the papers down. 

After a day in the jig-press, the book looks as wonderful as the first two attempts! I'm really excited at how well the repairs worked, and particularly proud that they went together without any major gaffes, and without needing to start over at any point. I have one or two more books that have loose bindings, and feel confident about fixing them soon. I sense my next challenge will be with a copy of The Secret of Pirate's Hill, which has some damage to the cover on the outside of the spine, in addition to the loose connection of cover to text block. I think I'll need to use the repair tape on the inside of the spine to mend it, then cover that with a spine stiffener before affixing the text block back onto the covers. I'll let you know how it works! I might even try to make a video of the repair...

The Quest Continues

As I've been going through the revised books, compiling the artwork together, and studying the different styles of the illustrations, I've also been searching high and low through the internet for any kind of clues about who drew the pictures.

The base assumption throughout the internet, and on every site with otherwise relevant information, is that an artist was commissioned to paint the cover art, and threw in the internal illustrations. For the initial run of original texts, this was undoubtably the case. Many of the early illustrations are signed, and when not, easily identified by the style. For the first 33 titles in the series, this meant producing a cover image, and a frontispiece.

The covers and frontispieces for the first fourteen books were done as paintings, with a full color printing of the cover image made for the dust jacket, and a black ink halftone used for the coated stock of frontispiece. Beginning in 1936, the frontispieces were created as black line art and reproduced on plain paper, like the text. Revised frontispieces were drawn in this style to replace the halftone images in 1944 and 45, and all subsequent internal artwork was done as line art on plain paper.

Some of these replacement frontispieces were not made by the same artist as the cover in use for that title, but if you look at who painted the covers for those two years during which they were replaced... you find Stricker and Scott. It's very likely that the practice of having the cover artist provide the frontispiece continued through 1949 and title #28, The Sign of the Crooked Arrow. Numbers 27 and 28 were both produced and signed by Russell Tandy. The covers for numbers 29-31 were painted by William S. Gillies, but the frontispieces are another story, as are the first two Rudy Nappi covers for numbers 32-33.

There is no credit on the frontispiece artwork for #29, The Secret of the Lost Tunnel, and #30, The Wailing Siren Mystery. They both look to be drawn by the same hand, and logic would presume that it was Gillies himself. It's hard to say for certain from looking at them. The covers seem very different - flat and two dimensional, like cut-outs set up in a diorama, then photographed. The colors are cartoonish, but I think the reality is that photographs were staged, then the covers painted from them. There is a realism in the features that make them look like they were painted from photos.

Curiously, the frontispieces for The Secret of Wildcat Swamp (Gillies) and The Crisscross Shadow (Nappi) are both drawn and signed by Roy Pellington. There is no signature for the frontispiece used in the original text printing of The Yellow Feather Mystery, and it's hard to be certain who drew it. It is similar in ways to the Pellington art, but also looks like it could be Nappi.

From this point on in the series, it becomes difficult to identify the illustrator with any certainty. Nappi is responsible for all the covers going forward in the series, and all but three of the covers for the revised texts of the books. Yet there are at least three distinctive styles used in the books produced in the 1960s and 70s, with George Wilson responsible for almost half of the titles.

The last seven titles published before they began the revisions in earnest are hard to label. I would say that #37-40 were drawn by Nappi, but the others differ too much to classify. #34 and #35 are similar to #33, but clearly different, as evidenced by these two strikingly similar images of Joe slugging a villain.

The image on the left is from #34, The Hooded Hawk Mystery. The image on the right is from #35, The Clue in the Embers. In the latter, Joe is a little boy. Some of the poses in the Hawk artwork reminds me of Nappi, but his covers feature iconic representations of Frank and Joe, and these drawings seem very different. The other possibility is that the artist was instructed to make the brothers more boyish from one book to the next.

The other oddball title here is #36, The Secret of Pirate's Hill. Nappi painted the cover, but certainly did not draw the internal art. Compare Frank and Joe in the image to the right with the artwork above, or any of the painted covers... They are done by a separate artists. Fortunately, all of the internal illustrations appear to have been done by the same artist, and the frontispiece is signed!

Unfortunately, the signature doesn't seem to reveal itself very clearly, as seen on the left. The author of #36 was John Almquist, which is tantalizingly close to the signature, but doesn't appear to be it, just the same. It appears to end in "-oyler", but the initial letters are written over each other making it difficult to separate them unless you have some names to consider.

So, I've been searching for information on who the Stratemeyer Syndicate used for illustrators. In the process of doing this, I found a copy of the decision rendered in the 1980 lawsuit between Grosset & Dunlap and the parent company of Simon & Schuster over who held the right to print old and new titles. In it, the judge mentions that Grosset & Dunlap contracted the illustrators for the internal art, but that didn't grant them joint copyright over the books since they weren't essential to the story. Apparently, the Syndicate gave them direction on what they wanted for the art, but Grosset & Dunlap commissioned and included the artwork as part of the printing process. That was new to me, will require a different tack to track down names for the artists.

George Wilson

Just a quick note today, but I was able to find a link to a biography of George Wilson, illustrator, and wanted to reference it briefly. For about a year, I've felt confident in saying that George Wilson was one of the primary illustrators of late 60s and early 70s Hardy Boys titles. This was based on two elements exclusively, that these drawings are clearly distinctive of being drawn by a single hand, and secondly on the evidence of the UK site (hardyboys.co.uk) that mentions George Wilson as the credited artist for the frontispiece of the UK imprint of Secret of the Lost Tunnel.

In other words, it was largely circumstantial that George Wilson was the artist, but equally unquestioned which illustrations were his. Today I ran across a biography entry on George Wilson that features two telling bits of evidence that the information I've been believing is accurate. Namely, George Wilson is "made illustrations for romance and wild west paperbacks, including book series like 'The Hardy Boys'."

What a feeling to have researched and found a name, grouped titles by matching the style of the artwork, and finding a corroborating acknowledgment that the linking of the two is accurate and justified. The second bit of interesting info was one of the samples of Wilson's artwork. In it, Tim Robinson is featured, looking very much like the iconic style of Joe Hardy that makes sorting out which Hardy Boys titles are illustrated by Wilson so easy.

For comparison, I used the frontispiece from Secret of the Lost Tunnel, which seems to be the only known illustration credited to George Wilson (in the UK imprint). I think the similarity is remarkable, and spot on. There are other instances where Joe is drawn even more like this image of Tim Robinson, but I wanted to use the credited illustration to strengthen the connection I'm trying to make. Joe really has a distinctive look in Wilson's drawings.

Artist Unknown

Divide and Conquer
I've been going through the scans I made of all the internal artwork from the revised texts of The Hardy Boys and trying to separate them into styles. I've classified six styles, although there seems to be evidence that at least three of them might be the same artist. I've labeled them styles A-F, with style A as Rudy Nappi. Style B also seems to be Nappi, but there are some changes with it that gave me reason to classify it separately. Mostly, this is a looser line style that might just come from working more quickly.

Style C is clearly the work of a different artist, and distinctive enough to group together as the work of a single artist. According to a UK website (hardyboys.co.uk), George Wilson was the artist for the imprint of book #29, The Secret of the Lost Tunnel. Wilson has a distinctive look for Joe and Frank that makes grouping these titles together as style C very easy.

Style D was an unknown artist, and I lumped #38, The Mystery at Devil's Paw and #52 The Shattered Helmet under them. This caused me a lot of angst as I studied them, but more on this later in the article.

Style E is another unknown artist, and only applies to #53, The Clue of the Hissing Serpent. What is interesting about these is that they are clearly drawn in high 70s fashion, with large square pockets and long hair. Published in 1974, they are remarkably prescient of the TV show that went on the air in 1977, with Frank, Joe and Chet all looking like Parker Stevenson and Shawn Cassidy. I also find it striking how much they resemble the iconic, classic look of Frank and Joe. My gut is that these were drawn by Rudy Nappi, and with only one book to produce artwork for that year, didn't need to be rushed.

Style F is another distinctive style, and the work of another unknown artist. These are awful in my opinion. They are stark and angular with buttons for facial features, and disproportionate angles and perspectives. There is little about them I find appealing.

Looking Closer
Style D gave me a great headache. In particular, book #52 bothered me. I'd see elements of style E in some of the images, and similarities with book #38 in others. Part of how I separated these by styles was to look at which books were produced in each year from 1959 through 1979. The covers were all done by Rudy Nappi, and I think he was also producing the internal art as well, continuing a long-standing tradition.

Beginning in 1961, revised versions of the early books were released alongside the new titles. In 1961, there was one revision, but 1962 had three, 1963 one, 1964 saw three. 1965 had three, 1966 saw 5 in addition to the new title, and 1967 another two.

Most of these revised texts feature art that I would classify as style B. They look like Nappi, but they also look hastily drawn. Given the volume of artwork required (the original versions only featured a frontispiece, but the revised editions featured five additional drawings within the body of the text), it is easy to understand why they look rushed.

Style D was given to the year 1973, with the new title #52 The Shattered Helmet and the revision of #38 The Mystery at Devil's Paw. These show a clear break from the style of George Wilson and style C. Book #52, as I said earlier, gave me headaches. Look at these two examples from that book and I think you'll understand.

 

The airport image has odd angular postures, little facial features and just overall sketchy detail. It looks like a rough bit of line art that never got fleshed out. Contrast that with the image of Frank and Joe studying film over Butler's shoulder. Care has been taken to flesh out the figures, there is a lot of detail in the facial features, and a relaxed, casual comfort in their posing.

I couldn't decide how to classify them, largely due to these two images. Finally, it struck me that they must not be done by the same artist. That had never occurred to me before, that illustrations within a single title might be done by two different artists. Frankly, I think the image on the right is Rudy Nappi, and feel that this book can be reclassified as style E (maybe B - E is still unique in ways, but I think more in the medium used than a different artist). The answer seems to be that the airport image was either commissioned separately, or more likely, commissioned as a last minute replacement from another artist. I'm inclined to suspect that the artist of the airport image is likely the unknown artist of style F.

This made me wonder if #38 was really a separate style, or if it could be reclassified as well. So I opened them up in Photoshop to look more closely.

The Eureka moment
Looking at the last image in #38, I was wondering if it could be the same artist as that of the airport image. There was a sketchy angularity in each that jarred with my senses. But when I glanced down, I noticed initials in the corner! "A.O." was there in the corner. It was a wonderful moment! Style D was a distinct style, and furthermore, none of the other revised artwork was connected with those initials. I eagerly checked the other images in the book for the initials, and there they were. I was no closer to knowing who A.O. was, but it was something to start with.

Anticipating a deeper perusal of the UK site again to try finding any reference to an A.O., I looked at the next image. This one had a name, "A. ORBAAN"! My heart leapt in my chest. I don't know how I've missed it all this time, but there it was as clear as day. A quick internet search lists Albert F. Orbaan as an American artist and illustrator (1914-1983).

This made my day. I've been struggling and researching artists, trying to pin down who actually drew these illustrations, and finding nothing. Almost every site you visit lists Nappi as the de facto artist - he painted the covers, so he must have drawn the illustrations. It is thrilling to have found an answer, even if it is just one.

Here is the frontispiece from book #38 The Mystery at Devil's Paw with the artist's signature. Also, if you check out the image on the right, you'll notice that the original image was drawn with the car being forced off the road to the left, but the image was flipped so it was going off the right shoulder. Here's a hint... the artist's name gives it away (Albert Orbaan).

 

Touching Base

I first began reading The Hardy Boys in 1977, when I was in the second grade. I started with The House on the Cliff in the revised text. I remember trying to read copies from the library before this (my brother had been reading them for years already), but I never got into them enough to finish them in the time I had them checked out. They were cool, though, with their red and brown covers, thick pages and glossy frontispiece.

At a later time, I excitedly found an old copy of The Tower Treasure with a brown cover and orange endpapers at a yard sale for a quarter. We used to go to town once a week for groceries, and my brothers and I would head for the bookstore while my parents went grocery shopping. I bought as many Hardy Boys books as I could gather money for, and read them voraciously. My collection had begun.

Years later, it came to my attention that the stories had been revised beginning in 1959. That's when I noticed my copy of The Tower Treasure was an original. It was the first original text book I'd read, but I hadn't even realized it at the time. That began a new journey, to find and read the originals.

I've finally reached the point where I have all the books, original and revised, but a couple of years back I realized I hadn't read them all. So, I decided to start at the beginning and read them through in order. After noticing a couple of posts online reviewing certain titles, I also decided to follow up reading each book with a quick reaction blurb. I managed to type up the first 20 or so, then my computer died, taking all that effort with it.

I got sidelined at that point, but eventually picked back up. I wavered after The Mystery at Devil's Paw, debating whether to continue through the later books, or return to the beginning and read the revised texts. I decided to continue. The revisions were sporadic, and released in their own odd order, so there didn't seem to be a logical way to read them. I decided to finish reading the new stories, then read through the revisions. Many of these I'd read as a kid anyway.

I've gotten to The Clue of the Hissing Serpent, and remember reading the final six of the canon when they were new in the 1970s. I can finally say I've read the whole series... Soon I'll start again with the revised texts. Then, I'll be better able to speak to how they changed and evolved through the years.

Whose Pen Drew What?

There are many sites devoted to the Hardy Boys online, and you can find information on everything from authors to outlines, cover art and artists to discussions of where, exactly, Bayport was located.

Lost among these, however, is any real discussion of the internal artwork. Unfortunately, even when there is mention of it, the information is minimal at best, and outright wrong at its worst!

Over the last year, I have become intrigued by this fact, and begun trying to address it. I have finally completed building sets of the original text and revised text books, allowing me to begin this process.

I have taken each of my books and scanned the internal artwork into Photoshop. These raw files I have cleaned up, straightening the scans, making them all a universal size and resolution, and adjusting the exposure to give them a similar contrast.

I have been fortunate in the books I have ordered, and with the books that my brother has gathered for his collection, to get enough duplicates to have all of the variant frontispieces. For the most part, there are two sets of artwork, those for the original text and those for the revised. What I've found in scanning these is that there are two further outliers, the half-tone frontispieces from the first 14 books in the original series, and the internal art for books 34-38.

Now that I have them all scanned, I've begun gathering them together and trying to decipher who drew what. Sometimes it's easy enough (like when the artist signs them), but sometimes the confusion is overwhelming. For the most part, the internal art was done by the cover artist. Three books lost their frontispiece in the forties (I'm surmising to bring the page count down by one to allow printing 1 less signature per book). With The Mark on the Door, the original cover art and frontispiece was done by J. Clemens Gretta. The 1934 frontispiece was removed in 1947, and Bill Gillies commissioned to revise the cover art in 1950. Between 1962 and 1967, the book was issued in a picture cover format with the Gillies' artwork and no frontispiece... yet, the inside title page lists "Illustrated by/J. Clemens Gretta".

This is an obvious example, but there are other gaps in the history that should be corrected. That is part of what I hope to achieve here. That, and offering everyone a chance to see and experience the wonderful art for themselves.