The Secret Of The Old Clock: The Original 1930 Edition Featuring
Language: English
Published by Principle Press, 2026
- Softcover
- Used
Seller: Hawking Books, Edgewood, TX, U.S.A.Hawking Books
AbeBooks seller since February 14, 2022
Condition: Used - Very good
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Seller Inventory # X1967243670X2
- Title
- The Secret Of The Old Clock: The Original 1930 Edition Featuring
- Author
- Keene, Carolyn
- Publisher
- Principle Press
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- Very Good
- Binding
- Soft cover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1967243670
- ISBN 13
- 9781967243679
The Secret of the Old Clock (1930 Restored Text): The Original Nancy Drew Mystery
Before she was the polite, eighteen-year-old titian-haired detective of the 1959 revisions, Nancy Drew was sixteen, lawless, and a product of the Jazz Age.
Published in April 1930, mere months after the Wall Street Crash, the original text of The Secret of the Old Clock is not the sanitized mystery familiar to modern readers. It is a "rough draft" of American girlhood written in the shadow of the Great Depression—a narrative where the villains are motivated by starvation, the landscape is scarred by poverty, and the heroine operates with a "flip" independence that her publishers explicitly feared would alienate the public.
This edition restores the unrevised 1930 manuscript executed by Mildred Wirt Benson. It preserves the original twenty-five chapter structure, the original illustrations, the sensory grit of the era’s "mud roads," and the visceral class conflict that was later smoothed over for the post-war suburban market.
Beyond the novel itself, this volume functions as an archive of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the "fiction factory" that manufactured the series using Fordist mass-production principles.
This Archival Edition Includes:
-
The Unabridged 1930 Text: The raw, high-velocity prose of Mildred Wirt Benson, untouched by the 1959 rewriting committee.
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The Original Visuals: The complete set of 1930 illustrations by Russell H. Tandy.
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The "Explosives" Manifesto (1914): The full text of Franklin K. Mathiews’s famous essay "Blowing Out the Boy’s Brains," capturing the hostile literary environment that sought to ban Stratemeyer’s "machine-made" books.
About the Edition: This is not a nostalgic reprint; it is a critical restoration. It documents the collision between a Victorian industrialist’s formula and a modernist ghostwriter’s execution, offering a stark view of the girl detective before she was sanitized for her own protection.
This edition presents the original, unexpurgated text attributed to Mildred Wirt Benson. It contains contextual appendices and annotations in the form of a new introduction and preserves the cultural artifacts of the era—the language, the pacing, and the specific social anxieties of 1930—without the editorial sanitization of the mid-century.
This edition presents the text exactly as published in 1930. It reflects the attitudes and prejudices of its era, which may be offensive to modern readers.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Hawking Books
Edgewood, TX, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since February 14, 2022
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