The Digest Paperback Series

     Continuing on from my post at the end of July, the next Nancy Drew series to be discussed is the Digest Paperback series. Officially, the digests are considered a part of the Classic series, with the first book actually being #57 (The Triple Hoax). Because there were so many changes between the two series a lot of people consider books 57-175 to be a separate series. I decided to separate them on here because I was able to give more information that way.

     In 1979, The Stratemeyer Syndicate switched publishers, going from Grosset & Dunlap to Simon & Schuster. In 1984, The Stratemeyer Syndicate was sold to Simon & Schuster. The Digest Series began in 1979, after the switch. It ran for 24 years, ending in late 2003, and consists of 119 books. The books were no longer written under the same format. For the most part, the Digest books are approximately 140-150 pages and 15 or 16 chapters long. They were written by many different ghostwriters and used several different illustrators.

     The books were mainly printed as paperbacks, but several of the earlier volumes were printed in the yellow hardcover format, used in the Classic series. An example of one of these books is shown below.

Left: The Triple Hoax, Paperback
Right: The Triple Hoax, Hardcover

     The writing style was very similar to that of the Classic series, but it seems as if there were not so many rules. In books #77 and #78 (The Bluebeard Room and The Phantom of Venice) Nancy is not only running around Europe with boys other than Ned, but she is kissing them too! Something like this would never be allowed in the Classic series. For the most part though, the books avoided incidents like those and were written like the Classic book. For more information, visit the Digest Paperbacks section of Lea Fox's Nancy Drew World. The next series I discuss will be The Girl Detective series.

~Sienna