Hardy Boys First Editions: How to Tell a 1927 First Printing

Hardy Boys first editions are the Grosset & Dunlap hardbacks published in New York from 1927, and the first printing of each title is identified by its lists, not its date. Every printing of The Tower Treasure for more than thirty years carried the 1927 copyright, so what matters is the last title named on the jacket flap and in the advertisements bound in after the text: a first printing names nothing later than itself. The 1927 to 1932 books are red cloth with a black shield stamped on the front board, blank endpapers and a single glossy frontispiece, in a white-spined jacket with a red shield painted by Walter S. Rogers. This guide sets out the tests, the formats, the rarest states and what copies have actually sold for. It is the companion to our Nancy Drew guide: the two series share a publisher, a format history and most of their traps.

We record the series on its own page, with each title's first edition and its points against the printing: The Hardy Boys. The work pages cover the three 1927 titles, The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill, and the rest of the first ten: The Missing Chums, Hunting for Hidden Gold, The Shore Road Mystery, The Secret of the Caves, The Mystery of Cabin Island, The Great Airport Mystery and What Happened at Midnight.

The formats by era

Because the copyright date stayed fixed, the format places a copy within a few years. The Hardy Boys Webzine's tables and the Nocloo collecting guide agree on the sequence, though they differ by a year or two on some changes.

Years	Boards	Endpapers	Jacket	Notes
1927 to 1932	Red cloth, black shield on the front board	Blank	White spine with a red shield, Rogers art	Volumes 1 to 11; one glossy frontispiece
1932	Brown cloth	Gretta design printed in brown ink	White spine	The brown-ink endpapers were used in 1932 only and are scarce
1932 to 1943	Brown or tan cloth, several shades	Orange Gretta	White spine for volume 12; yellow spine from volume 13 and on reprints	Frontispiece dropped from most titles after volume 15; thin wartime paper from late 1942
1944 to 1951	Thinner brown boards	Orange Gretta	Yellow spine to volume 24; wrap-around from volume 25	Volume 24 found in maroon in 1945
1951 to 1961	Tan tweed	Orange Gretta, then brown multi-scene	Wrap-around	Common; revised texts of volumes 1, 2 and 14 in jackets, 1959 to 1961
1962 to 1987	Picture printed on the boards, matte blue spine	Brown multi-scene, then white multi-scene, then double oval	None	Nothing after volume 40 was ever jacketed
1987 onward	Glossy picture cover with a flashlight symbol	Blank	None	Still in print

The Webzine dates the tweed at 1951 and the brown multi-scene endpapers at 1959; Nocloo has 1952 and 1957. The Webzine's FAQ puts the picture cover at 1961; its own volume table, Nocloo and the Series Books for Girls blog say 1962. Unlike the early Nancy Drews, the Hardy Boys had one glossy frontispiece rather than four plates.

The first printing tests

The flap list. The front flap lists the titles in print. On a first printing the list ends with the book itself, or with an earlier title when the flap was not updated in time; collectors call this "listing to self". The three 1927 titles were copyrighted on the same day, and PBA Galleries describes the first-issue jacket of The Tower Treasure as listing just those three; we have found no second description of that flap and give it as reported. A jacket that lists to volume 34 is from the early 1950s. The flap dates the jacket, not the book, since the two are often parted and re-married.

The advertisements at the back. Grosset & Dunlap bound pages of advertisements for its other boys' series after the text and changed them with each printing. Newport Vintage Books says the lists changed every year and that each title exists in dozens of combinations; Bauman Rare Books cites the rear advertisements and the jacket verso as the first-issue points for its 1928 Hunting for Hidden Gold. These sequences are what Tony Carpentieri and Paul Mular's Hardy and Hardy Investigations codes printing by printing, which is why dealers describe copies as "1927A-1" and why a careful buyer asks for the advertisements to be photographed. Our guide to points of issue explains how such sequences are worked out.

The page 31 letter. The one textual point in the series is on line 12 of page 31 of The Tower Treasure, where the first copies off the press have a complete letter t that was damaged as the run went on. PBA, Biblioctopus, Burnside and Bookbid all cite the unbroken t as the mark of the earliest state, and Heritage catalogued a copy with the broken t as an early printing. It is a state within the first printing, and it does not prove the jacket.

The endpapers and boards. Blank endpapers, red cloth and a black shield put a copy in 1927 to early 1932: the first printings of volumes 1 to 11 and reprints of the earlier ones. In 1932 the Gretta pictorial endpapers arrived, printed in brown ink for that year only, then in orange until the late 1950s; the Webzine FAQ says the brown-ink endpapers belong to the first printings of 1932.

The frontispiece. Early printings have a glossy frontispiece by the jacket artist. Check that it is present; a missing plate is the commonest defect in a red-cloth copy.

The rarest titles and states

The scarce group is the 1927 to 1932 red-cloth printings of the first eleven titles with their white-spined jackets, which the Webzine calls very scarce and highly prized. The jacket is where the money sits.

The rarest of all is the first printing of The Tower Treasure in its first-issue jacket, "the Hardy collector's Holy Grail" in the Webzine's phrase. Biblioctopus, selling one, could find only one jacketed copy in the auction records since 1975 and two more the records had missed; PBA estimated its copy at $8,000 to $12,000 in 2025. The Webzine FAQ calls the first printing of volume 11, While the Clock Ticked (1932), in red cloth with a jacket exceedingly rare; that is one site's judgement and we leave it as a report.

Later rarities are states rather than titles: the 1945 printing of volume 24, The Short-Wave Mystery, bound in maroon cloth with maroon endpapers, apparently by mistake, and the brown-ink Gretta endpapers of 1932. The first picture-cover printings of 1962, which list to The Mystery of the Desert Giant on the back cover, are a cheaper target.

The 1959 revisions and why the original text matters

The books that sell for pounds rather than pennies are the original texts. Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian journalist, wrote nineteen of the first twenty-five from Edward Stratemeyer's outlines between 1927 and 1946, for a flat fee of $125 a book and no royalty; the stories ran to about 25 chapters and 212 to 216 pages. From 1959 Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and the Syndicate's staff revised volumes 1 to 38, a few a year until 1973, cutting most to 20 chapters and about 180 pages. Adams herself rewrote The Tower Treasure and The House on the Cliff in 1959; The Secret of the Old Mill went to Alistair Hunter in 1962. Dated slang went, the racial stereotypes that parents had complained of since the 1940s were taken out, and several titles were given new plots altogether, so the revised House on the Cliff and Old Mill are different stories under the same names. The Stratemeyer Syndicate society adds the plainer motives: cheaper printing and fresh copyrights.

For identification the rule is simple. A copyright date between 1927 and 1958 means the original text, and 25 chapters confirms it, though the society warns that some late original texts already had 20 chapters. A picture cover of volumes 1 or 2 can only be the revised text, because those were rewritten before the format changed.

The Rogers jackets

Walter S. Rogers (1870 to 1937) was the Syndicate's house illustrator from the 1910s and painted the jackets and frontispieces for the first ten Hardy Boys, 1927 to 1931; his Tower Treasure design was redrawn in 1932. J. Clemens Gretta followed for the mid-1930s titles and drew the pictorial endpapers that carry his name, Paul Laune painted the late 1930s and wartime jackets (volumes 17, 21 and 22 among them), A. O. Scott redrew The Tower Treasure in 1944, Bill Gillies repainted several early jackets in the early 1950s, and Rudy Nappi (1923 to 2015), who had painted Nancy Drew from 1953, did the revised-text covers from 1959 and the original covers of volumes 32 to 58. A first printing wants its Rogers jacket; a Rogers jacket on a tweed book is a marriage. Our guide to dust jackets covers how to tell a jacket that belongs from one that has been supplied.

British readers: the first UK editions

The Hardy Boys reached Britain in 1950, four years ahead of Nancy Drew and through the same door: Harold Hill & Son of Newcastle upon Tyne tested the market with The Secret of the Lost Tunnel, then issued seven titles in 1951, among them the first five Americans, and more in 1953, 1955 and 1957. The first three Hill books used the American jacket art; the rest had new paintings by Frank Varty, and the texts were anglicised ("harbour" for "harbor"). Sampson Low took the series on in 1958, Collins published mostly revised texts from 1971, and Armada paperbacks followed from 1974. The Hill books are the UK firsts, but they are a quarter of a century behind the originals and have never been priced near them.

Traps

The 1927 date. It appears on every printing of the first title until the 1959 revision. Treat it as the name of the text, not the date of the copy.

Revised texts in old clothes. In 1959 to 1961 the revised volumes 1, 2 and 14 went out in the same tweed boards and wrap-around jackets as the originals. Count the chapters.

Picture covers. Everything from 1962 has the picture printed on the boards and never had a jacket; a "first edition" picture cover of volume 1 is a reprint of a revised text.

Facsimile jackets. Rogers-design jackets are sold new for $15 to $20, and early Applewood facsimiles of the books carry a "Just As You Remember Them" logo. A bright red shield on a white spine deserves a close look, because the original ink usually faded.

Switched jackets. The flap list dates the jacket and the endpapers date the book, and they must agree.

What they have sold for

These are reported results with their sources, not valuations. Dealer prices are asking prices, some later marked sold; the PBA figure is an estimate, because the house does not publish the result openly.

Book	Sale	Price
The Tower Treasure, 1927 first printing, unbroken t, first-issue jacket	PBA Galleries, Fine Literature, 20 February 2025, lot 187	Estimate $8,000 to $12,000
The Tower Treasure, first printing, first-state jacket, very good	Biblioctopus, undated listing marked sold	$5,500
The Tower Treasure, first printing, unbroken t, near fine in jacket	Burnside Rare Books, current listing	$15,000 asking
The Tower Treasure, first state, very good jacket with a tear	Bookbid Rare Books, current listing	$7,500 asking
Hunting for Hidden Gold, 1928A-1, red cloth, white-spined jacket	Bauman Rare Books, June 2023 catalogue	$5,800 asking
The Mystery of the Flying Express, probable first printing	eBay, 1998, reported by the Bayport Times	$168
What Happened at Midnight, 1941 printing	eBay, 1998, reported by the Bayport Times	$152
The House on the Cliff, revised text in jacket, "This Volume Free" overprint	eBay, 1998, reported by the Bayport Times	$50

Heritage Auctions sold three jacketed first editions (The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Shore Road Mystery) as one lot on 5 August 2015, but shows the price only to members, so we do not quote it. A jacketed first printing of the first title runs into the thousands of dollars, a jacketed 1920s first of a later title sells in the low thousands, a jacketed 1940s printing is a $150 book, and most copies trade for the price of a paperback. If you own an early one, grade it honestly, photograph the flap, page 31 and the advertisements, and compare it with sold copies of the same printing rather than with asking prices.