That photo yesterday. The photo. I don’t know if you remember from the many times I’ve told our story in the past, but Don had been sitting in that exact place on the sofa, catching my eye and smiling at me, whenever I entered the living room of Kathy’s cottage. This happened several times. So I finally bit the bullet and walked over to him. I assume I introduced myself. I ended up sitting next to him and we started a conversation that hasn’t ended.
I’m not sure when Rick entered the picture. Was he there before I walked over to the sofa? Or did he come along later and join in? That part I’m a bit foggy about.
A few of my friends have remarked on our body language. Definitely in sync. And if you look at my eyes, you can tell I’m already smitten.
I love that picture. It will soon be framed, I promise.
Alright, on to yesterday. We were out and about and stopped at our favorite antique center – the one where I could do some major damage quite easily. I didn’t do that, of course, but I did find some unexpected treasures.
A long time ago, I wrote on this blog about my desire to collect vintage Nancy Drews. This was prompted by my discovery of a vintage Nancy Drew with a cover illustration by Russell H. Tandy; the best, in my humble opinion, of all the cover illustrators. He designed the covers from 1930 – 1949 and was a friend of Edward Stratemeyer, the actual author of the Nancy Drew books.
Look what I found yesterday:
Two of them! They were in the middle of a stack of books in one of the booths. Only $8 each, which is a steal, and in pretty good condition, with normal cover wear. Needless to say, I’m thrilled. This makes 3 Nancy Drews and we all know that equals a collection!
Gosh, I love the vintage look of his illustrations and the vivid colors. I also love the font used for “Nancy Drew Mystery Stories.” I grew up reading the standard fifties and sixties books with the yellow spines and I know a lot of people collect them, but once I saw Tandy’s work, I was a goner.
In a recent conversation, Don mentioned that he had read all the Hardy Boys books when he was a kid, so, you guessed it…I am determined to collect them for him. I found one yesterday.
And here they are on the shelf:
They sit in the middle of a shelf full of childhood favorites, including books that belonged to my mother and my father.
I also found two record albums.
I own both of these, but they are…class? anyone? anyone?….yes! In the shed. Though the cover of Tapestry looks worn, the actual record is in great shape.
And then we stuffed our faces at a local restaurant and I ate too much, so we took a trail walk to counteract the calories.
Today, I take the car in for an inspection and some scheduled maintenance. I hate sitting in that waiting room, but it’s raining today, so I just might get stuck there. If the rain lets up, I’ll walk to Barnes & Noble.
Happy Monday.
I’m green with envy over the Nancy Drew books. I have mine (about a half dozen) that have the yellow spines, but yours are so neat. You’ve given me an idea, too, about the Hardy Boys books. My husband collected them as a boy and his mother gave them all away! It would be fun to find some for him. I love a treasure hunt!
Go for it, Karen! I bet he’d love having them again!
Good morning! The picture of you and Don is so cute. You can tell that you are meant to be together. I use to have tons of Nancy Drew books when I was little. I loved reading them. Wish I still had them and all the albums I had growing up. Even though I don’t it does put a smile on my face just thinking of the memories and that I will always have. Have a great day!!
hugs
Thank you so much, Nancy! You, too!
I love hearing stories of how couples met. I don’t have any of Carole King’s albums but I do have some of her CDs. First time I heard her music was while watching the Gilmore Girls. Watching the DVDs is one of our favorites activities we do together. I read the Nancy Drew books too. The ones with the yellow binding. Don’t you just want to frame the covers of the books? There is just something about the way life use to be. The simplicity that it shows. I have wanting to tell you about a restaurant that is called “The Traveler’s Restaurant” that is in Connecticut. What is special about this restaurant is that you can get 3 free books after you order a meal there which is also pretty good. The restaurant is at the Union, Connecticut exit which is past Hartford Connecticut. It is the last exit before you go into Massachusetts. There is also an antique bookstore too. The reason I mention it to you is that is that you are reader and been to Hartford.
Thanks so much for the tip, Trina. I’ll be spending a lot of time in Hartford next year and this would be a perfect thing to do on a day off!
The covers of those Nancy Drew books are so delightful! I would love framed prints of those. I’m running out of room for my collections so it seems another round of downsizing things is coming soon. I really do love that photo of you and Don, oh yes you are BOTH smitten in it already. It’s cloudy here but cooler and that is always nice.
hugs!
Rainy here and little humid! It’s been humid for the past 3 days.
Oh heavens, I really have to downsize this winter!
I have been cleaning and trying to declutter but I miss looking for new collections to enjoy. I have been working on my quilts but now my husband is saying how many do we need? I just smile and say I don’t know. 😀
Good for you, Doris!
I was an avid Nancy Drew reader…guess mysteries have always been my thing. But, I don’t remember the color of the spines…I have a distant thought that they were blue. All I do remember, was I pretty much had all of them . My mom gave them away many years ago when she was downsizing. I’ll watch you collect them….I don’t have any more room! ;)
There were so many different editions over the years. The book itself (without a cover) is a blue tweed.
Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden fan here! Also, Trapestry is one of my very favorite albums, also Diamond Girl. Loved that sweet picture of you two falling in love birds!
Thank you so much, Dottie! Do you know, for some reason I never read Trixie Belden!
I absolutely adored Nancy Drew books and I kept all of mine. I am also trying to get the ones that I didn’t have. They are still popular with my granddaughters. Some of the books have been revised, but my grandkids prefer the original version. You got a very good deal. Some of the books (especially the ones with the book covers ) that I have found have been quite pricey. My granddaughters know these books are special to me and they are ever so careful with them when they borrow one.
You were smart to keep all your Nancy Drews, Dottie! And it sounds as if your granddaughters are very careful and respectful of them.
So much going on in those cover illustrations, I love the vintage look and feel of them. They tell a story all by themselves, don’t they. I’ll admit, I can’t help reading a book by its cover, much of the time. I don’t remember reading many Nancy Drews, more of a Trixie Belden girl. I definitely had the Carole King album…lost to downsizing along with many, many others.
Covers make a huge difference, I think! These would look good framed, wouldn’t they?
Didn’t get a chance to comment on yesterday’s post Claudia but I just love the picture of you and Don on the day you met. I was 18 and working as a cashier at my aunt and uncles service station/ convenience store. One day my aunt said she knew a guy who had a crush on me and I laughed it off until she pointed him out to me. I was a goner! Now my 21 year old groom is 65. We had the privelege of helping take care of that same aunt in her last days. If I could relive any year of my life it would be our first year of marriage.
Love your ‘meeting’ story, Janie!
I still have my Tapestry album!! Still love every song that is on it…
Warm and humid here, too. We may get some rain later in the day. Sounds like you had a wonderful Sunday. We are getting ready for my best friend (since I was 7 years old) and her husband to visit us from Denver this weekend. 60 years of friendship. I have many friends from college and beyond, but those friends we actually grew up with ~ who knew our families, our pets, and our adolescence as well as knowing us now,,,, well, there is something special about those ties. Since I am quite a distance from where I grew up, no one I know now ever knew my family. Special when there is someone we can talk about things from 60 years ago!!
Hope your vehicle inspection goes well and you get that walk to Barnes & Noble. Have a great Monday!!
I have a couple of friends like that – both of them I’ve known since kindergarten – one of them, I actually met for the first time when I was 4! We are far apart as they live in Michigan, but we’re still in contact. Have a wonderful time with your friend, Chris!
Great discoveries/buys, Claudia! What fun to uncover treasures. Tapestry….my favorite album ever. Have you seen Beautiful? We saw it in San Francisco before it hit Broadway. My 20-somethings daughters are big fans too. We took them to a Carole King/James Taylor concert a few years back., when they were young teens. They loved it.
You know, I don’t really have any desire to see Beautiful. I’ve heard it’s good, but I know Carole King’s story and I’d much rather hear the original groups sing her songs, as well as Carole herself. I think if someone gave me a ticket, I’d go, but there are other musicals I’d rather see (and still I can’t afford them!)
Congrats to Don on Mr Robot’s nominations and wins!!
Exciting, isn’t it! I was so happy for the young man who plays the lead. He is so talented and is mesmerizing in that role.
Wanted to add this link to Deanie’s Stash blog on Nancy Drew books posted 9/19/16.
http://www.deaniesstash.com/the-mystery-of-the-pink-nancy-drew-book/
I hope this link will work when you click it – if not, simply google Deanie’s Stash. She has written an interesting post on ND books.
Thank you, Mary! I’ll check it out! I’m familiar with the website she mentions. I have it bookmarked!
I read Nancy Drew when I was in 5th grade in the late fifties. Our school library had them and I read all they had. Don’t remember how many.
There are a lot, I know that! I owned some, got some from the library, and several of us borrowed them from each other.
I didn’t read the Nancy Drew series, but I read my older brothers’ Hardy Boys. The covers and titles used to scare me so much I couldn’t sleep. We found some at an “antiques” (ha!) shop a few years ago and my daughter thought they were funny. Different time, different audience, I guess.
Claudia, is there a particular edition you’re collecting? I know my daughter recently put 8 or 9 of them into a box for the hospital second-hand bookshop. Maybe some of them are just what you’re looking for!
The editions that you see in the picture. With the covers by Tandy and the yellow script font at the top. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if there were some in that box?
No Nancy Drew, but a bunch of Hardy Boys. They look like the one in the photo, but different publication dates.
Oh, sorry! I misunderstood. The publication date on the Hardy Boys book is 1964. But if they look like the one in the photo, it probably doesn’t matter, right? They were probably published as a set over a period of time. So that would be fine!
I love the photo of you and Don…how special to have one of your first meeting! Nancy Drew was a fun part of my childhood, too!
I’m sort of itching to re-read them, Linda.
One of my Dad’s sisters never married and ALWAYS gave me books for birthdays and Christmases, which I loved. At the time, I was the only one of her dozen nieces/nephews that was a reader, and she loved that I was so much easier to shop for than all the other kids. But for some reason, I never got Nancy Drews. I got series like “Trixie Belden” and “The Bobbsey Twins” and “Cherry Ames Student Nurse” etc. And, I’m happy to say, a lot of the classics like Black Beauty, The Wind in the Willows, the Wizard of Oz series, some Dickens, some Kipling. I even got all the Beatrix Potter books as a baby. NO idea of what happened to anything of them now though. I’m sure my mom must have boxed and donated them all at some point, or maybe had them in one of the garage sales she’d do every few years as we all got older, moved out etc. Later she regretted not keeping more of our childhood things, but with 6 kids so close in age, I know she wasn’t, at age 30-35, really thinking ahead to grandchildren. She did wish she’d kept a few of our Polly Flinders smocked dresses etc, so my niece Julia [a fashion plate even as a toddler] could have worn them too. Enjoy your “new” Nancy Drews – there’s not much that’s more fun than getting lost in a great book from your childhood. Flashback on a laser beam!
My mom gave away a lot of my books, too. She would do that – she’d just decide to get rid of things, without really asking us about them. So I’m trying to replace those childhood favorites that I loved so well – and maybe read a few that are new to me as well!
Why did our moms do that, Claudia? We’ve all touched on this subject before here when it’s come up. One thing for my mom, I think, was the new popularity of the ‘garage sale’ in So Calif in the late 60s. She was by nature frugal, and my folks didn’t make a lot of money. I think she found garage sales as a way of having pocket money, not for herself, but for all kinds of little things (extras) any of us needed (like piano lessons; can’t fault her for wonderful things like that, bless her); I’m sure once we got in the teen years, we were wanting more things although my brother and I always worked at small jobs from early in our lives, him with a paper route and then as a bag boy at the grocery store, me with my babysitting from as early as the age of 9 (and I also typed sermons for a church!).
I want to think my mom asked me when my childhood treasures went out ‘for sale’ but I kinda don’t think she did; I’d tend to just go along with what she thought or wanted to do because I just naturally thought that she knew about stuff and was right. We were kids; how could we know? It wasn’t like she didn’t have knowledge about antiques (and that which could BECOME a likely antique); she was ‘into’ that sort of thing, always (she’d go to the thrift stores when thrift stores were kind of looked down on); she had interest in old things and certainly held on to any book that she had ever bought for herself before she was married…although she didn’t seem to mind getting rid of mine (ouch, it sounds so harsh for me to say that)! I had a boyfriend from a thousand years ago who said his mom would clean out his room while he was at school and when he’d come home, all his little collected treasures of rocks, twigs, etc. would be gone (he grew up to be an agricultural biologist; he loved flora and fauna from an early age; it was interesting to him; so, he was crushed when she’d purge his room which I think is terribly disrespectful to a child).
Like you, I’ve been working hard (research endeavor) for TEN YEARS to replace childhood possessions which were dear to me…books and dolls, primarily; a few toys and board games. However, I’ve had difficulty finding my little yellow records (78s) from my earliest childhood; they seem to not exist (I guess they got easily broken with little hands); if I did eBay, maybe I’d find some there (I do have a somewhat-recent book about them; it has some resources). I had stacks of those playing records. Listened to them for hours on a little portable record player. It’s how I learned a lot of little-girl songs, the old ones; classics (not rock ‘n roll). I got the records as hand-me-downs from relatives because my family just couldn’t afford a lot of things for kids although I never felt, for the longest time, that I ever did ‘without’ and my childhood was just fine. But it was the library for books, or books borrowed from best friends or ones handed down…Bobbsey Twins, Trixie Belden, Boxcar Children and a few Nancy Drews but not in your glorious covers!
My husband doesn’t understand why I have such a strong need to replace what I’d loved and I’m not sure I totally understand it either, but it comforts me and that’s all that counts! I’ve had people my age who are parents and grandparents, saying they’ve re-lived their childhoods through their kids and grandkids, but I don’t have that, so I think my beloved books and Barbies help me do that very thing…if your childhood was pretty good, naturally it’s something to celebrate and, I dunno, sort of refresh your ‘identity’?!
Many childhood books are being reproduced, back in print; you can get them in paperback on Amazon. Did we discuss that here? I’ve gotten the Candy Kane books again; others. There’s a gal named Nancy Pearl, Seattle Public Librarian, who has worked with Amazon to bring back books from our boomer childhoods which is called the Book Crush series (some in hardback), “recommendations for children and teens”. I’d loved the ‘Best Friends’ series by Mary Bard (elementary school years) and she brought back Book 1 of that trilogy from my childhood. I’d looked for years for the first editions. I recently got repros of old Virginia Fairfax/Helen Randolph stories about Mexico; they’re not unlike the Nancy Drew mysteries and are really old, from the 1930s. (Evolved from the Girl Scouts Mysteries.) I could go on and on, on this subject, but my comment here is already ‘way too long!
You know what I like best about that picture?..The fact that after all of these years you remember every little detail of what went on between you and Don and have not one single clue as to when or where or how your friend Rick got in the picture…that fact speaks volumes to me of where you mind was set that day..Tunnel vision I believe they call it ..lol….Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and The Hardy Boys..I read them all…I am also glad to read from other ladies here that children are still enjoying them….Tapestry..yup I had it..Those were the days my friend…
I was all a-twitter, Nancy! I remember driving home that night with Rick and thinking about Don.
I was never a Nancy Drew fan ( don’t know why) but I LOVED Trixi Belden and Donna Parker and some of the Disney Annette series of mysteries as well.
I think it is swell that you are collecting the Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books. The cover art of vintage books are usually what draws me back to them too! :)
The artwork is such fun, Elizabeth! I remember reading the Annette series, Elizabeth.
I had that Carole King album in my collection when I was a teenager, I wish now that I had kept them. You’ve probably all ready thought of this yourself, but are you going to get a copy of the photo of you and Don made just as insurance in case anything happens to the original?
I probably will, Jan.
I love this post! I had all the yellow Nancy Drews and you picked up 2 of my favorites! How funny the things we remember. Have been on a decluttering tear lately and it feels great so I know I’m ready. Now I’m collecting free space. Yeah!
You absolutely look smitten in that picture. So cute!
Thanks, Deb! (I have to tackle some decluttering myself – soon!)
My mom had six of the 1930s Nancy Drew books with those lovely covers that were read by both of us. After she passed away we decided to give them to my sister in law who just loves them. I have 3 of the yellow spined ones from the 1960s. Most of my reading was from library books!
That picture of you & Don is so sweet!
Thank you, Debbie. I think I borrowed a lot of the Nancy Drews from our local library as well! And from friends.
Claudia, please remind Don that we’re waiting to hear HIS version of the day you met.
Now would be a good time.
*sigh*
Probably for our next year anniversary Nancy. On July 4th.
The photo is amazing. Yes, you both look in love. I always associate you with Carol King. I remember you liking her in high school.
I sure did, Kay. xoxo
My son and his new wife have decided to collect vintage books, I was at a rummage sale the other day and found 6 Hardy Boys books at .50 each! I grabbed all of them quickly in case someone else might want them! (The truth is I was the only one there at the time.😊) His wife is collecting Cherry Ames books, they are a bit harder to find. So happy hunting!
What a great deal you got on those Hardy Boys books!
I haven’t seen ANY vintage Cherry Ames books, so I bet they’re hard to find.