E-Bay buyers of Hardy Boys Mystery books should be aware that a large proportion of the books advertised on E-Bay are the bowdlerized (i.e., butchered through revision) editions published after 1959 by Grosset & Dunlap as though they were originals. The original canon of Hardy Boy books, Volumes 1-38 were copyrighted between 1927-1959. Beginning in 1959 Grosset & Dunlap began revising these first 38 volumes of the Hardy Boys series, concluding the project in 1973.
Many children's literary critics have denounced the revised editions of Volumes 1-38 as a complete "gutting" of the original texts, involving "dumbing down" of the books due to an increasingly less literate child audience, shortening them considerably, and in a number of cases creating totally different texts, misleadingly still published under the same title. Here is a summary of the appalling changes made to the original texts:
Earlier readers who recalled McFarlane’s unexpurgated texts bemoaned their loss. Canadian journalist Bob Stall, the man who first informed McFarlane of the wanton editing, warned him,“The old books were written for a literate generation. But not these new ones. And they’ll engender an even less literate generation. The books Twere shortened from 25 chapters to 20 and the writing style was made terser.Difficult vocabulary words such as "ostensible" and "presaged" were eliminated, as was slang.[12] As a result of the new, more streamlined writing style, the books focus more on non-stop action...[64] and "prolonged suspense [is] evaporated."[65] The books were also aimed at an increasingly younger audience[66] with shorter attention spans.[63] For this reason, many commentators find the new versions nothing less than "eviscerated",[12] foremost among them being the first Hardy Boys ghostwriter, Leslie McFarlane, who agreed with a...[67]
Unless the advertised Hardy Boy volumes 1-38 are copyrighted between 1927 and 1959 by Grosset and Dunlap, they are NOT the original Hardy Boy texts. The only exception to this are a limited number of facsimile editions of the original text books, volumes 1-16 published by Applewood Books, and the complete line of original volumes 1-38, as well as subsequent volumes 39-66 (never revised) published by Penguin Press (US), which are still available.
The problem of poor quality editions is a major problem for naive buyers on sites such as E-Bay and Amazon, not only with regard to books but with regards to videos and DVD's as well. If you don't know the history of the original editions you may well end up getting an inferior product, or even worse a completely different product than what you thought you were getting.
