Three really nice condition small hardbacks, all first printings (or therabouts; they all list 6 titles on back cover and have blue stains to top edge of paper). Absolutely beautiful, they are, the picture doesn't do them justice. 
Nice, eh? I snapped up the Crooked Cat paperback and Whispering Mummy hardback (a snip at only £3). 
I decided against the omnibus editions at this point as I found them to be a little tatty. Sharp eyed bloggers will spot the Hardy Boys titles poking their spines in. If you are a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew collector, you could do worse than pay The Box of Frogs a visit as they had a couple of shelves heaving with some really nice vintage examples. I see that one of the Hardy Boys is a Harold Hill edition. Here is my hot tip for the day folks. If you ever come across any Harold Hill Hardy Boys books with their dustjackets, BITE THE DEALER’S HAND OFF. Hardy Boys fans go nuts for them, as they had different cover art than their American counterpart editions. Bloke by pen name of Varty did them. Most dealers in the UK are unaware of this, however, and tend to lump all old Hardy Boys dustjackets together, so the Harold Hills and Sampson Low editions are usually priced about the same, normally in the £10 bracket. I say, get them on eBay where they will fetch anything upwards of £40.
Wigtown is an excellent place, if you are a book collector. It has about a dozen or so bookshops, including what claims to be Scotland’s largest second hand book shop. Unfortunately, none of the other shops that were open had any Three Investigators for me, so I left with my modest haul of booty and only another 400 miles to drive home.
These are all books that I've picked up over the last couple of years. Nothing too startling here, and a bit disappointing not to find any hardbacks as I was sure that there was at least one large hardback in there somewhere. Maybe it's buried deeper and will require a more extensive mining operation to uncover. Still, it's nice to see that 1st paperback Vanishing Treasure, always a tricky one to find as it was never reprinted with that cover. That 3rd edition Stuttering Parrot is quite hard to come by as well, and the An Ear For Danger is quite lovely too. Nectar!
Wow! When did you last find a hardback Three Investigators in a charity shop? I reckon its years since I’ve found one, yet here it is. Condition is a bit shite though, as you can see in the picture. The previous owner, Paul Morton, had taken to doodling on the cover of the book, shading out some of the lettering with a pen. Looking at the pen marks, I realised that this was not a random scribbling, but clearly a code worthy of Jupiter Jones himself to solve! You see, he had scribbled out certain letters, which when written out, clearly formed a word. The letters are; “G A O T R O R O.” What does this mean? Fuck knows, I am not Jupiter Jones, if I ever bump into Paul I will be sure to ask him. Mind you, that is if he hasn’t murdered everyone in his entire family yet. What am I talking about? Ever watch The Shining with Jack Nicolson? Hmm? Then check out the inside back cover of the book:
He also wrote this epithet on the title page and across the top edge of the pages. I’m telling you, no-one in the Morton household is safe, it is only a matter of time.
A superb set of eleven 2nd edition paperbacks! And at only £3.00 for the lot, a bargain was had. Nice books, they appear unread, although they all have the previous owner, one Moira Leishman of Kilmarnock’s name on the title page. If you’re reading this, Moira, your books went to a good cause. In case you haven’t realised it, this was the second extraordinary thing that happened. How often do you find that many Three Investigators books in the one shop these days? Doctor Scott seemed a little bemused at me buying these books, asking me, “Will you read them?” I said that I would , even though the correct answer should have been, “probably not.”
Descibed as: “First UK edition hard back binding in publisher's original panoramic colour illustrated paper covered boards, illustrated end papers. 8vo. 8'' x 5½''. Contains 160 printed pages of text. Superficial wear to the lower spine end. Near Fine condition book in Fine condition illustrated dust wrapper, not price clipped.” What a cracker and reasonably priced at £33.85 including postage. I think it’s a bit early to be paying these kind of prices for single books at the moment, so I’ll keep my powder dry for now as it were. Nice book, though.
Fair enough, and the description of “good, clean condition, original owner, smoke and pet free home, slight yellowing of pages due to age” seemed reasonable. The current price for this lot is £4.99 with one bid. Then I looked to see what else they were selling and spotted this:
Honestly, is that the best picture you could manage? This is by far the best Three Investigators lot listed currently and easily by far the worst picture. I have no idea what the seller was thinking about when they went with this graphic. The other lot they have listed:
frankly doesn’t look much better does it? Although at least they managed to get the picture the right way up. Anyway, I’ll certainly be putting some bids in for all of these lots, you never know your luck and if you’re not in, you can’t win. I suspect they will all go for a much higher price than I can afford at this point, I really must get around to listing that Fireball XL-5 book to raise some funds so I can increase my bids. I see they also have a nice pictorial cover Jennings book that I will bid on, however that topic is outwith the scope of this blog, so I will mention it not.
If you can draw your gaze away from that tasty looking sultry blonde on the Cindy Dees spine for a minute, you will notice the tell tale signs of the Crimebusters omnibus: Rough Stuff and Funny Business. AHA! I thought. A book for my collection. Then I thought to myself, “Don’t you already have a copy of that in your garage?” The book was £1.25, so I put it back and didn’t buy it. In my experience, the Crimebusters omnibuses are by far the easiest Three Investigators to find, so even if it turns out I don’t have a copy in my garage, I’m confident that I’ll find another, cheaper copy, somewhere else.
Lovely! A 1965 Fireball XL-5 annual for only £1.50! Bargain, surely, so I snapped it up.
Not a bad start, eh? Although I see that even though I have only bought nine books, I have already got myself a deadly double! In this case, two copies of 3rd paperback Dancing Devil. Doubles are easy to deal with. You simply have a look at the books, decide which one you want to keep and put the other in your auction pile. When this pile gets big enough, stick it on eBay to raise some money to buy more books.
Notable and easily identifiable as they are large books, sometimes referred to as “tall” editions, I’m going to refer to them as large hardbacks. The first 28 books in the series were published in this format, between 1967– 1979. Most had the graveyard picture of the boys as front and end papers. Numbers 19 to 28 were published with a dustjacket.
Total number of books to collect: 28
The 2nd hardback edition is like this:
Only books 1-24 were published in this edition. Easily identifiable as the spine shows a small picture, separate from the front cover. This makes this edition stand out on a bookshelf and is easily my favourite format.
Total number of books to collect: 52
The first paperback editions took this format:
The first 24 books were available in this format, with one book (number 5 – Vanishing Treasure) having two different covers.
This is where it starts to get complicated, as not all of the titles were made available in this edition. There were in fact 26 books in this edition, between numbers 1 to 30.
Again, not all titles were made available in this edition, there being 29 of the first 38 titles available in it.
31 editions from the 43 titles were available in this edition.
In a drastic departure from the established norm, the fifth and last paperback edition changed the name of the books, removing the “Mystery” and “Secret” of and placing the series under the banner The 3 Investigators Mysteries. Therefore The Mystery of the Moaning Cave became simply “The Moaning Cave”, thus:
30 books were put out in this format.
There were 21 omnibus books published, some were reprints of previous omnibus editions with different cover art.
Total number of books to collect: 225
In addition, the first six Crimebusters titles were published as omnibus editions with two stories in each book, making three Crimebusters omnibus editions.
Total number of books to collect: 228
And that, fellow blogger, is how we arrive at the magic figure of 228. Now we have a target, let’s see how we get on. The counter at the top of the page will be updated every time I add to the collection. Let's get on with the hunt!
