Thursday, June 03, 2010

Nancy Drew Hidden Staircase Painting & Book Stand

Last year I purchased The Hidden Staircase painting from Rudy Nappi. It was so iconic and one of my favorite stories in the series. I still have my Hidden Staircase book I had as a child too featuring this cover and had Rudy sign it at our 80th Nancy Drew convention this year.

For the 80th anniversary, classic Nancy Drew publisher Penguin decided to create a really neat stand-up cutout of Nancy and wanted to use the painting to get a really detailed high resolution scan in order to be able to blow it up with lots of clarity.

They hired a company in Scottsdale to do the scanning and so in order to do a full scan, we had to remove the mat shown above. I was a bit nervous about doing that but it came apart fairly easily revealing the whole painting below:

As you can see in the painting, there is a lot of detail surrounding Nancy and the staircase--cobwebs come across very clearly and it's a really neat scene!

I still need to have it framed, now that I'm done with the high res scanning. My only issue is whether to keep the mat that came with it that is signed by Rudy Nappi or do something different so that when it's framed more of the artwork shows. I like the idea of showing more of the artwork. What do you all think?

Here's the neat stand-up that Penguin created for their "Drewtique" displays that hit Books A Million Bookstores and other independent book stores in April:

We raffled one off at our 80th Nancy Drew convention this year.

Jenn:)

3 comments:

Jan Markley said...

Cool story. that was one of my favourite Nancy Drew books as well.

MK said...

I would vote for showing more of the painting when you have it reframed. It would be a shame to cover up all that extra image. Maybe you could have the matte on the back of the frame so you could turn it over and show the matte with the signature. The framer should know how to do this--I have a painting with a handwritten story about the subject on the back.

Or you could frame the matte separately and put the high-quality reproduction inside, and hang it somewhere else in your house, or even pose as the scene for a photo and put that in!! That would be fun.

Jenn Fisher said...

Good ideas on the framing!

Jenn:)