after fiddling with these i discovered that the felt is pretty unnecissary, and actually just ends up getting lots of felt debris on the screen which needs to be constantly wiped off.

Keeping the inside of the book intact also improves the aesthetic.

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g9/capntim/IMG00057.jpg

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g9/capntim/IMG00056.jpg

Seems a shame to cut up an old Hardy Boys book, when folks spend a lot of time looking for them, but I applaud the choice of title -- it seems remarkably appropriate somehow. :grin3:

this one was in pretty rough shape, out of the bunch i found at the salvage place i chose the one with water damaged pages.

as i said in the first thread, i try to find books that wont be missed, i aim for damaged ones, or books about trivial subjects.

Oh, I didn't mean to complain, I was just lamenting the loss. Even though it was already lost in this case, I'm still a bit saddened, that's all. :nice:

I do have fond memories of reading The Hardy Boys when I was a lot younger. What you should have used was an old Nancy Drew book.

there were a bunch of those too but they were in pretty decent shape. i'll keep an eye out though, the salvage place gets in new stuff all the time.


and for those of you in the bay area, thats urban ore salvage on ashby avenue... i believe that area is still technically berkeley.

I do have fond memories of reading The Hardy Boys when I was a lot younger. What you should have used was an old Nancy Drew book.

You can't say that! I used to have a crush on Nancy Drew :grin:.

I collect old "juvenile" books - Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, etc. The original HB books were wonderful - then they ruined them by re-writing them all to be "politically correct".

OH I loved and read Nancy Drew books when I was a kid........... read lots and lots of those. Probably could down one of those a day now. :)

Looks cool. Definitely brings back some memories of all the books I read as a kid; I read both Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (can you believe they're about to release a ND movie in the theaters? HB's too!). I guess these books tend to lend themselves to this purpose as I remember them being a tad smaller than normal-sized hardback books.

Yes they were pretty small, probably 100 or so pages......probably now that I think about it dust one in a couple of hours if they still keep my attention..... actually I have run into a few *out there* and have them in .rft form and read one...... didn't give me the chills as they did as a kid but that is to be expected.

At least with the HB's the re-written "sanitized" versions were considerably "slimmer" than the earlier originals. They chopped a lot of material out. Perhaps they thought that kids in the 1950s and 60s had lower standards of reading than had been the case in the 20s and 30s.

I always thought that was the real motivation, Harry. :shrug:

I loved Nancy Drew as a kid (still have a thing for redheads, but obviously not too much of one: my wife's a dark blond). I've read a couple of the original ones again recently (in paper -- it was before the Reader's launch), and like Karen, I didn't find them as riveting, but they're still pretty good. One of these days I may break and buy the set of "original" texts, to see what they were like, I've only ever read dumbed-down version.

The first dozen or so of the original HBs were reprinted recently by a company called "Applewood Books" - they are fascimiles of the original printings and very nicely done. Available from Amazon.

It's easy to see WHY they were revised - they use words for (for example) black and Chinese people which would be considered grossly offensive today.

Surely they could have removed the words without totally rewriting the things, it had to be more work to do that. :no:

I completely agree with you, yes. I have both the original and the revised versions of them and, comparing them, the revised versions, which are about 3/4 the length of the originals, have lost all their "atmosphere". I really don't understand why they couldn't have just removed the racist stuff and left the story alone. I can only guess that perhaps they thought that teenagers wanted shorter, "easier" books to read.

BTW, you can't insult Nancy by calling her a "redhead" - her hair, at least in the original books - was always "titian" (whatever "titian" might be :grin: ). I think she did become a redhead in the revised versions, though.

... Just looked in up in the dictionary and apparently "titian" means "golden brown" or "reddish-brown". Named after the painter Titian who used the colour a lot. So now we know!

The watered down versions make her strawberry blond. That was about the same time Barbie went peroxide too, if I'm not mistaken.

I'll take your word for that :grin:.

Fair enough, I've taken other folks' word on it, I'm not old enough to remember the 50's, whether that's a bad or good thing, I'm not sure of. :smug: