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.