Hardy Boys Hunting for Hidden Gold, Franklin W. Dixon, Grosset and Dunlap Tan Cloth, c. 1944–1958

The Piece

Hunting for Hidden Gold, the fifth of the Hardy Boys mysteries, in the Grosset and Dunlap tan cloth binding of the 1940s and 1950s: the boards a warm biscuit tan stamped in dark brown with the title, the author's name and the famous silhouette of Frank and Joe Hardy on the front, the spine lettered to match. The book opens to the orange pictorial endpapers of the series, the Gretta design of a boy with binoculars at a tree above a river and a cabin, printed in the bright orange that every reader of the brown-era Hardy Boys remembers, and to a glossy frontispiece of the boys at the mine captioned Slowly, Gradually the Great Rock Began to Move, with the Hardy Boys Mystery Stories series title and the Grosset and Dunlap imprint on the title page. The copyright page carries the 1928 copyright to Grosset and Dunlap. A previous young owner has written a name and a street in pencil on the front endpaper, as young owners did.

Condition is good: the cloth clean and bright with light soiling and rubbing to the edges and corners, the spine square and lettering legible, the hinges sound, the endpapers bright with the owner's pencil inscription, the frontispiece present and clean, the text block tight with the toning to the pages that the wartime and postwar paper always shows, no tears or loose pages found. Issued with a dust jacket, long gone; offered without.

History & Provenance

The Hardy Boys were invented in 1926 by Edward Stratemeyer, the New Jersey publisher whose Syndicate turned out Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, and written to his outlines by a Canadian newspaperman named Leslie McFarlane under the house name Franklin W. Dixon. McFarlane wrote the first books for a flat fee and no credit, and wrote them better than anyone had a right to expect for the money; Hunting for Hidden Gold, published by Grosset and Dunlap on May 1, 1928, sends Frank and Joe west to a Montana mining camp called Lucky Lode in a blizzard, after a lost mine, a gang led by a villain called Black Pepper and their father Fenton Hardy, who has gone ahead and vanished. It was the first of the series to leave Bayport, and it is the one in which McFarlane's own northern winters and his feel for the frontier come through most clearly. The original texts were cut and rewritten from 1959 onward, this title in 1963, so the full McFarlane story survives only in printings like this one.

Grosset and Dunlap bound the Hardy Boys in red cloth with a black shield from 1927 to 1931, then from 1932 to 1950 in brown cloth with the silhouette of the two boys, followed by a thinner tan tweed from 1951 and picture covers from 1962. The orange pictorial endpapers by J. Clemens Gretta were introduced in 1932 and replaced in 1958, and the frontispiece in this copy, captioned Slowly, Gradually the Great Rock Began to Move, is the second frontispiece commissioned for the title in 1944, replacing the 1928 Walter Rogers plate. The dating rests on those printing points rather than style alone: the tan silhouette cloth, the orange Gretta endpapers and the 1944 frontispiece together place the printing between 1944 and 1958, and the book is dated c. 1944–1958. The pencil inscription on the endpaper is a prior owner's and has no bearing on the attribution.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A tan Hardy Boys with the orange endpapers is the book that sends a grown man back to a bunk bed and a flashlight, and it is also one of the best-looking small hardcovers of its decade: the biscuit cloth, the brown silhouette and the flash of orange inside make it a natural on a boy's shelf, in a cabin, a den or a study, stacked with other tan and brown series books or standing alone on a nightstand. It is a gift for a reader of nine, a father who had the set, a Montana or mining family, or a collector working toward the full run of original texts. For a shop or designer client it is the affordable, instantly recognizable period hardcover that styles a vintage vignette and sells on sight.