I read a few Nancy Drew books earlier this year. One was The Mystery of the Brass-Bound Trunk (#17). I bought it at an antique store in Vermont for $3. It’s not a perfect copy. The cover’s a little stained, and there are marks on the inside covers from past owners, one of whom was a girl named Faye. Faye liked to practice writing her name in cursive, and she owned a red marker with which she added a dash of color to the world. I don’t mind those kinds of marks in books–they simply speak of the book’s history–and I hope Faye has done (or did) well in life.
The basic plot: Nancy is getting ready for a cruise to Buenos Aires with a school group, when suddenly a wealthy but unpleasant woman shows up at Nancy’s house demanding that Nancy withdraw from the tour. The woman claims that she doesn’t want the notorious sleuth associating with her well-bred daughter, and she has the clout to make trouble for the schoolmistress if Nancy goes on the trip. So Nancy makes a compromise. She agrees not to travel with the group, but she and her friends George and Bess still go to Buenos Aires, and they voyage on the same ship. Someone else on the ship has a brass-bound trunk marked with the initials N.D., just like Nancy’s, and this leads to some confusion. Later, in Buenos Aires, Nancy’s trunk gets stolen, and she sets to work tracking it down. The nogoodniks who nicked her stuff had better watch out!
It wasn’t a very good story (I only give it a B grade), but I love reading Nancy Drew mysteries. They’re exciting, and they hearken to simpler times. But, when reading them as an adult, you can’t help but see them through the lens of modern times. Nancy throws herself into harm’s way, and she brazenly makes demands of authority figures that, by anyone else, would be laughed off or criticized, but she gets away with it all, thanks to her good looks, money, and connections. It would be cringe-worthy were it not part of the charm. Nancy can do anything, have anything, go anywhere. She’s smart, happy, successful, and surrounded by supportive people who do everything she asks. Who wouldn’t want to be Nancy Drew?
Nancy Drew books don’t have print dates on them, so it’s hard to tell exactly how old they are. This book has the original copyright date (1940), so I know it’s not one of the later rewrites, and it has that delicious old-book smell. It has the matte yellow cover that means it was printed between 1962 and 1986. Given its general appearance and copyright date, I’d say it’s from the 1960s.
I wondered if it were possible to approximate the print date more closely. Since Wikipedia lists the publication date for each book of the series, I theorized that you could guesstimate the age of a Nancy Drew book using the list of “Books by Carolyn Keene” at the beginning of the book. That seemed reasonable, until I realized that yellow-covered printings have BBCK lists on their back covers, and those lists don’t match the ones inside the books. They have a few more titles on them, suggesting that the inner lists lagged by a few years. So I guess the cover lists are better to use. Anyway, using that method, my copy of The Mystery of the Brass-Bound Trunk can be pegged to 1967 or thereabout.
P.S. When I set out to write this post, I was only going to talk about the story, but I got sucked into the “mystery” of the publication date. That’s what comes from reading Nancy Drew books. They’re like a gateway drug for sleuthing. Next thing you know, you’re looking looking for mysteries and digging up clues all over the place!