The early Judy Bolton books have glossy internal illustrations.
Click on each image in order to see it at a higher resolution.Glossy frontispiece used from 1936 to 1942:
A blog for vintage series books like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys... featuring modern middle-grade fantasy... young adult dystopian novels... vintage teen books... vintage book collecting, buying, and selling topics... and more.
The early Judy Bolton books have glossy internal illustrations.
Click on each image in order to see it at a higher resolution.This series consists of three books:
1. Plague Land, 2017
2. Plague Land: Reborn, 2018
3. Plague Land: No Escape, 2019
While the series is marketed as post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, it is actually science fiction horror. That's an important distinction, because it lets readers know that this series will not conclude like typical post-apocalyptic fiction. Readers should know for sure where the plot is heading by the beginning of the second book.
While I enjoyed reading all three books, the plot is grim, much more so than the typical dystopian fiction. Seriously. These books are not for the faint-hearted and might be a bit disturbing even for many people who enjoy dystopian fiction.
Since the books are young adult, the grimness of the plot is bearable. If these books were adult novels with the kind of graphic descriptions found in adult novels, I would not have been able to read them. Since the graphic scenes are described minimally, I was okay with it. A vague description of a character's horrific death is sufficient. I prefer to avoid the gore.
Overall, this series is excellent, but it is tough to read due to the grim content.
The early Judy Bolton books have glossy internal illustrations.
Click on each image in order to see it at a higher resolution.I listed quite a few books on Etsy. The books listed include the following:
tweed Nancy Drew
Nancy Drew original text picture cover
tweed Judy Bolton
tweed Dana Girls
Dana Girls picture cover
hardcover Nancy Drew Digest
Three Investigators
Rick Brant
Vicki Barr
Trixie Belden
Jennifer's Series Books on Etsy
My Etsy inventory is 10% off this week. I have excluded the tweed Nancy Drew books, since they are consistently selling and often quickly. My stock continues to diminish steadily, so discounting them would be illogical. The point of running a sale is to move books that aren't selling.
My eBay books are also 10% off this week.
Jennifer's Series Books on eBay
On eBay, I ended around 50 listings and moved them into bulk lots. I'd like to get my eBay inventory down to no more than 300 items. This is a long-term goal, since it's not happening anytime soon. Sales are rather poor, and books are moving very slowly. Bulk lots that I created months ago still aren't moving, so even cheap books in bulk are a hard sell.
I've listed just a few books on eBay so far, mainly Kay Tracey and some new bulk lots. I also lowered some prices.
I find that Nancy Drew books are now very hard for me to sell on eBay. While I did have 15 orders in the last 90 days that included Nancy Drew books, most of them were from repeat buyers. The repeat buyers are people who follow me. Outside of those buyers, my Nancy Drew books barely sell on eBay.
I am toying with the idea of removing most of my Nancy Drew books from eBay and placing them on Etsy. I think they'd do better.
Books from series that are more scarce do better on eBay. Those sales are slow as well but not as bad as Nancy Drew sales.
eBay now has an offsite ad program where sellers can pay to be included. The offsite ad program has a prohibitive daily minimum fee of $5. That would be $150 per every 30 days, which is a scary high fee. I would never do it.
I am required to pay for offsite ads on Etsy. I only pay the extra offsite ad fee on listings that are sold via offsite ads. In the last month, I was assessed $16.33 in offsite ad fees on Etsy. That's doable.
Aside from eBay's extreme offsite ad fees, I am suspicious as to whether paying those fees would gain me anything. eBay has given me a $100 credit, but I don't plan to use it. A number of sellers who have used the credit reported that it did little and that they cancelled the offsite ads once their credit ran out. The free trial doesn't seem worth it.
Many of us purchase the modern Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books as they are released. If you're like me, once you have each new book, you verify the first printing number line on the copyright page and then never look closely at the rest of the copyright page. The modern copyright pages are quite crowded with information.
The Simon & Schuster books of yore (pre-2009) had much less information on the copyright pages. I've often looked at those copyright pages, but I guess the information overload of the modern ones has caused me never to look at them closely, at least not until this weekend.
I've mentioned my obsession with the Keeper of the Lost Cities (KotLC) series, which is also published by Simon & Schuster under the Aladdin imprint. I'm now searching for first printings. I will get more into that in an upcoming post. Here, I stick to what's relevant to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books.
I have managed to acquire the second printing of the first KotLC book. As I examined the number line, 2468109753, I saw what was printed on the line immediately above.
Please click on all images in order to see them clearly.
All of my books are 10% off this week.
Jennifer's Series Books on eBay
Jennifer's Series Books on EtsyA two-book series by Kristy Acevedo was published by Jolly Fish Press in 2016 and 2017.
1. Consider, 2016
2. Contribute, 2017
I really hope I don't pass out and some custodian finds me naked on the gross tile floor. Probably crawling with foot fungus. E. coli. COVID. Ebola.
The countdown in each book fuels the reader's anxiety. Each chapter begins with how many hours remain before humans must make an important decision. For instance:
Chapter 7
Day 24: August—3,854 hours to decide
Each time I started a chapter, I took the number of hours and divided it by 24 to see how many days remained before the decision would be final. For 3,854 hours, 160.6 days were left.
These books have some very unexpected twists. I truly didn't know what was going to happen.
These are excellent books. It took me just 4 1/2 days to read both books, and the books are moderate in length. How fast I read is a good measure of how much I enjoy a book. These books make for great reading.
The early Judy Bolton books have glossy internal illustrations.
Click on each image in order to see it at a higher resolution.