The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series have been so successful since their inception that there is a common misconception that the books were instantaneously successful from their inauguration in 1927 and 1930, respectively.
Now that some of the business records for the Stratemeyer Syndicate
are receiving close attention from scholars, some interesting
facts are coming to light which have answered previously posed
questions and raised new ones.
In this case, the sales of the Hardy Boys are compared with the other "Franklin W. Dixon" series, Ted Scott. The latter series was an aviation series modeled after Charles Lindbergh and other aviation pioneers of the period. The first volume was Over the Ocean to Paris and was published a month or two after Lindbergh's flight. The intense public interest in Lindbergh's Transatlantic flight has been documented elsewhere but it is interesting to note that the total sales of Ted Scott were at times three times as high as that of the Hardy Boys and the average per volume was about twice as high until the Great Depression affected book sales.
A word or two about this data is appropriate. The
sales data from 1925 to 1929 was obtained from a document
associated with Edward Stratemeyer's estate settlement. At the
time, his daughters were seeking someone to purchase the company
before they began to run the firm themselves in the fall of 1930.
These sales figures were a prospectus for a potential purchaser.
The later sales data was tediously extracted from royalty records
at NYPL by Frank Krieger. This is especially tiresome work as it
involves going through many pages of documents to come up with
the simple figures shown here. In many ways it is a thankless
task for most people will look at the data, say "hmmmpf" to
themselves, and then move on. I would like to acknowledge Frank's
help on supplying the data for this page.
James D. Keeline
