The Secret of the Old Clock — The Original 1930 Text, Restored (eBook)

Everybody knows Nancy Drew. Almost nobody alive has read the book that started it all — as it was actually written.

In 1959, The Secret of the Old Clock was quietly rewritten: twenty-five chapters cut to twenty, Nancy aged from sixteen to eighteen, her roadster traded for a convertible, and the 1930 world she moved through — its language, its attitudes, its rough edges — smoothed away. The revised version is the only one that has been in print ever since.

This edition restores the original. The Secret of the Old Clock: The Original 1930 Text, Restored presents the complete novel exactly as first published in 1930 — all twenty-five chapters, proofed against two independent copies of the 1930 printing — with Russell H. Tandy's original 1930 illustrations, including the frontispiece that later printings redrew.

Editor Horace Harriott Jr. adds the story around the story: an introduction tracing what the 1959 revision changed and why; "The Woman Who Was Carolyn Keene," an essay on Mildred Wirt Benson, the Iowa journalist who wrote this book (and twenty-three of the first thirty Nancy Drews) for a flat fee of $125; a note on the period attitudes preserved, unaltered, in the 1930 text; and an appendix, "What Changed in 1959," for readers who want to compare the two Nancys for themselves.

For collectors, for grandparents who read the original and want the real one back, and for anyone meeting Nancy Drew for the first time — this is where she actually began.

Format: EPUB ebook, yours to keep. A printable Book Club Kit for this edition is also available in this store.

This is an independent public-domain edition, not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher of the modern Nancy Drew series.