In Praise of Nancy, the Hardys : Convention: The appeal of the kid-sleuth books and other series is no secret to fans, who toast their heroes this week.

As a child in the 1950s, Vicki Broadhurst of Newport Beach first discovered Nancy Drew. She and her girlfriends devoured every volume in the series starring the resourceful teen-age sleuth who tooled around River Heights in a sporty blue roadster.

“Between all of us we had just about the whole set,” recalls Broadhurst, 46. Like most girls who grew up reading Nancy Drew, she viewed the loyal, trustworthy and self-sufficient, all-American girl as a role model: “I would have been very happy in real life to have Nancy Drew as my friend.”

For Dan Josslin of Foothill Ranch, it was the Hardy Boys. You remember sleuths Frank and Joe Hardy of Bayport, the teen-age sons of “internationally famous detective” Fenton Hardy.

“They did everything kids would really like to do and couldn’t,” says Josslin, 48. “They had motorcycles, motorboats and cars--and their parents didn’t interfere with them. They were smart, attractive, popular and talented. Both the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were just wonder kids.”

If you read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys as a child--or you’re a child reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys in the ‘90s--Buena Park is the place to be this week.

Broadhurst and Josslin--two of Orange County’s biggest collectors of children’s series books--have joined three other Southern California collectors in organizing the Series Book Collectors Convention at the Buena Park Hotel from Thursday through Sunday.

Nancy Drew and the Hardys are just a few of the fictional heroes who will be discussed, probed and appreciated at the convention.

The world of series-book characters is a big one. There’s everything from teen sleuths to sports-series characters to Josslin’s favorite, Freddy the Pig (the lead character in a series about anthropomorphic barnyard animals). There have been hundreds of children’s-book characters over the years and each, it seems, has someone who collects them.

Josslin is not sure how many series-book fans will go to Buena Park, but a Nancy Drew convention at the University of Iowa last year gathered about 400 Drew fanatics from around the world.

“You make really good connections at these things--you meet other people you can trade books with from around the country,” says Josslin, regional services manager for the Orange County Public Library.

Unlike most series-book fans who stopped buying the books as teen-agers and began collecting later in life, Josslin has never stopped accumulating the books since reading his first Hardy Boys volume, “The Tower Treasure,” when he was 11.

He now has more than 4,000 books representing more than 100 vintage series. They’re impressively displayed in floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases in an upstairs room devoted solely to his series-book-collecting passion.

Nostalgia is a primary incentive for an adult to start collecting.

“If they’re in their 60s now, they remember fondly the books from the 1930s and ‘40s,” Josslin says. “My age group--the baby boomers--remember the books from the ‘50s. And, of course, once you get hooked as a collector, you branch out and collect books from different eras too.”

Series books are relatively affordable collectibles. A Hardy Boys book that sold for a buck in the ‘50s can be had for $10 to $20; Broadhurst, who began collecting in earnest 15 years ago and now owns about 2,000 series books, recently paid “under $500” for a “very scarce” 1904 first-edition Bobbsey Twins.

The appeal of series books to children is no mystery.

“They were real accessible to young readers because there was a lot of action,” Josslin says. “After you read the first one or two, you became real familiar with the characters and the formula. If it was a formula that appealed, like mystery or adventure or school stories or sports stories, you could count on that formula being repeated time after time.”

It’s been a winning formula for nearly a century.

Edward Stratemeyer, a writer of boys stories who became a phenomenally successful literary entrepreneur, is credited with founding the 20th-Century series book. As Fortune magazine put it in 1934: Stratemeyer did “the first of it, the best of it, the worst of it, and with rare justice made the most money from it.”

The key? He reduced the price of the books from as much as $1.25 to 50 cents. The books were dubbed “fifty-centers.”

“It was the combination of dropping the price so children could afford to buy them and shifting the focus from 19th-Century sensibilities to a more contemporary approach,” says Deidre Johnson, author of two books on the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which created the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and nearly 100 other series books for children.

Johnson, who teaches children’s literature at West Chester University in West Chester, Pa., and who will lead a panel discussion on series-book history at the convention, says series books for children started in the United States around 1830.

But, she says, “Stratemeyer was the one who introduced a lot of things we consider standard now, such as modern technology or current events and characters who don’t age.”

In previous series books, Johnson says, the characters would have tremendous success and thus move themselves out of the series. “Most of Stratemeyer’s heroes helped others and had smaller success so you could continue a series indefinitely. Before, many series would end after six volumes,” she says.

Stratemeyer’s first big hit, which he wrote early in the century, was the Rover Boys. In writing the series, which followed three brothers through adolescence, Stratemeyer tried to be “more playful, entertaining and more varied than previous series about schoolboys,” Johnson says.

After about 1906, Stratemeyer continued to write books published under his name and two pseudonyms, but for almost everything else coming out of his syndicate he would come up with the plots and others would write the books under pen names. They were, says Johnson, “mostly journalists who were able to write rapidly and smoothly.”

Another early Stratemeyer Syndicate series success, begun in 1904, was the Bobbsey Twins. Then came Tom Swift, the boy inventor, in 1910. But the heyday of the syndicate was between 1910 and 1930.

At the highest point between 1915 and 1925, Johnson says, “Stratemeyer had more than 30 different series going simultaneously and they covered everything: fantasy series, series aimed at little girls, series aimed at little boys--at boys interested in technology, boys interested in war, girls who wanted careers, girls who just wanted to imagine they had the leisure to travel around the country.”

The two most successful Stratemeyer Syndicate series books are the Hardy Boys (begun in 1927) and Nancy Drew (1930).

In Johnson’s view, the series books are less significant as children’s literature than as a window on children’s culture of the time.

“They’re invaluable for showing ideas that adults wanted to pass on to children and for looking at the importance of trends, like technology,” Johnson says. “You could see America’s amazement at the kind of technology coming out of that period. Airplanes started showing up in series books as early as 1909.”

Johnson says the older series books have been criticized for racist language, but even then “what they’re doing, even though we don’t like to admit it, is they’re mirroring attitudes of the times.”

Johnson says many of the Stratemeyer series books began to fade out by the early ‘40s, due, in part, to paper shortages during the war. The popularity of the movies and later comic books and television, she says, also had an effect.

Although series books for children have continued over the years, she says, “their popularity has gone up and down. Right now they’re in an up period.”

Indeed, although Johnson doesn’t have current statistics for boys series books, an updated bibliography of girls series shows that there were 230 new series for girls between 1975 and 1991.

Johnson guesses that “it was the girls series that really pushed the new series renaissance.”

Probably the most popular series today, she says, is the Babysitter’s Club and its spinoff, the Babysitter’s Little Sister.

Johnson is not sure why series books faded, then came back strongly over the past decade, but she thinks there are a number of reasons for their popularity.

“One is, they’re predictable: Readers know they can get more of the same kind of story, which is very reassuring in an increasingly uncertain world. Another is just the fun of finding a familiar friend in books,” she says.

Moving the series books into less-expensive paperback format in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, she says, also had an effect on their increased popularity.

But there’s another reason for their appeal, Johnson says.

“Maybe wish-fulfillment is the other reason. . . . Series characters usually seem to lead more successful, more glamorous lives than children in mainstream children’s literature, or the readers themselves.”

What’s on the Agenda

The four-day Series Book Collectors Convention is the third-ever general series book convention in the nation and the first in Southern California.

On the agenda are talks by William Gillies and Rudy Nappi, cover illustrators for Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books; Nancy Axelrad, who wrote for Nancy Drew and several other series; Joyce Brotman, co-producer of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys 1970s television series, and actor Frank Thomas, who played Nancy Drew’s boyfriend opposite Bonita Granville’s Nancy in four movies in the 1930s.

The convention also will offer nuts-and-bolts information on how to grade the condition of old books as well as a discussion of reference books. A dealer and exhibit room will have displays of original book-cover artwork, movie posters, board games and other collectibles, author contracts and rare series books from the end of the 19th Century through the 1970s.

Registration is $85. For further details, call Dan Josslin at (714) 581-0435.