When I was 9 I was sick for a month and my mother's rule was that if you were too sick to go to school, you were too sick to watch tv. So each day my grandmother bought me a new Nancy Drew book. By the time I was better, I had read every Nancy Drew book written up to that time. I have no idea what happened to those books - they were probably passed on to my sister and then given away.
A few years ago, I was in a used bookstore and saw an old Nancy Drew. When I saw that old blue tweed cover, I had to have it! It was very interesting....when the books were originally written, the authors had no idea of the staying power of Nancy so they describe life as it was in 1930's America (in Nancy's Mysterious Letter there's an interesting passage, for example, that explains how air mail went to England - it involved the train, Newark Municipal Airport, and an airplane launched from a ship at sea!). One by one, I collected all 36 "original text" books - all the books were rewritten eventually to remove any references that would date them.
Part of that collection is in the picture above. The most valuable is a first edition of The Secret of the Wooden Lady also known as a "Smoking Ned" because Nancy's boyfriend has a cigarette in his hand in the frontispiece. There was such outrage that it was removed from subsequent editions.
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