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.