The Nancy Drew series is the most successfull girl's series ever written. The success of the original 56 volume series has spawned several spinoffs including Nancy Drew Files, Nancy Drew Notebooks and Nancy Drew on Campus, all of which are aimed at different age groups than the original series.

As a child I read voraciously and especially enjoyed series books. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books were the most accessible and I read any I could get my hands on. Many of the stories aren't especially memorable though, and I tend not to remember details of books I've read but rather I remember the feelings the books engendered. Like many other girls before and after me, as I read a Nancy Drew book I was right there with her. Nancy could do anything. She made mistakes, got into scrapes, but she always figured out a way to do whatever she set out to do. She was my idol.

Now that I own copies of the first 75 volumes (and quite a few after that, but I do have some holes), I've begun to read the series in order from the beginning. Other than a few books that my mom kept for me, I've no idea which books I've read already and which I haven't. Until I started collecting series books and reading some of the research that's been compiled by other series book collectors I had no idea that the first 34 volumes had been re-written starting in 1959. It's very likely that I read mostly revisions though I did own a couple blue tweed books, minus dust jacket wouldn't you know. Used book stores were a favorite even as a child and the few books I bought I read over and over again.

When the books were revised some were just cut down with the plot remaining essentially the same. Typically the pace was accelerated. Where earlier Nancy was able to relax at times and enjoy her very unrestricted life, the revisions all had her moving at breakneck pace from one danger to another. Several volumes had some character name changes, added or deleted supporting characters and minor plot changes. And some texts were completely re-written with an entirely different plot. These usually retained some of the same character names giving a feeling of deja vu when reading the second version.

By reading each original volume followed by it's revision I am able to note the changes between them as well as some inconsistencies that are hardy noticeable otherwise. For instance, it's generally acknowledged that our first introduction to Nancy's boyfriend Ned Nickerson is during volume 7, The Clue in the Diary. However in the revision of volume 5, The Secret of Shadow Ranch, there is a Ned mentioned on two occasions. First on page 111 George teases Nancy about Dave's apparent interest in her, saying "And what'll poor Ned do?". Then on page 174 as the adventure comes to an end, Bess asks Nancy what she's going to do without a mystery to solve and she says "Work on the sweater I'm knitting for Ned." And knowing that Nancy and mystery are rarely apart, George sighs and says "Poor Ned! I hope he doesn't need that sweater very soon!" This is a surprise since early in the adventure, on page 3, when Bess asked Nancy what she was making she responded, "A sweater for Dad".

For more of these observations, see the list of book titles, where there is a link to each volume I've read or re-read so far. Each page also contains a table showing the characteristics of particularly sought after printings, and another with statistical information I've compiled including character names, landmarks, locale, rewards and souvenirs Nancy has been given and more. The latter information is also compiled individually for the entire series as Cast of characters, Rewards and souvenirs and Traveling with Nancy. As I notice more repetitive elements of the series they will be included as well. And as I learn more about the main characters each of them will get their own page. I've also included links to other sites devoted to Nancy Drew and her original creator Mildred Wirt.

The observations and compilations on these pages are my own, composed after reading each volume. There are several other websites dedicated to information on Nancy Drew, some of which contain similar information in varying levels of completeness. The sheer volume of material, over 350 volumes written if you include all the spinoffs, means that most of these sites will never be as complete as their creators originally envisioned when they began them. It is this incompleteness that has inspired me to try my hand at it. I don't know how far I will get, but...

I am by nature a "data driven" person, more at home with facts, figures and programming logic than personal relationships. I also have a very obsessive nature. To illustrate, I once spent nearly every free moment for a full six months working on a hand-knit afghan. It was double-sided (or reversible) with both sides looking like a stockinette stitch but actually stitched as if doing ribbing (K1, P1, K1, P1...). OK, if you don't know how to knit this won't mean anything to you, but ribbing takes much longer to do than any other knit stitch, and each row of the afghan took an average of 30 minutes to complete, and it fit a king size bed. I've met many people who cannot imagine having the patience and attentiveness to do that. But for me it is relaxing and enjoyable. As is reading, and compiling data, and writing HTML. So, check back here from time to time to see how I'm doing.