The three-volume breeder set of the Madge Sterling series written by Ann Wirt, a pseudonym for Mildred Wirt Benson, has always been a neat series. It was a three-volume set featuring the following stories: The Missing Formula, The Deserted Yacht, and The Secret of the Sundial. Madge Sterling tried to take on Nancy Drew during the depression – though the series never went anywhere past the first three volumes. I wrote an article about Madge Sterling and Nancy Drew this past April at my Nancy Drew Blog in which I revealed a lot more behind the scenes of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and Mildred Wirt Benson when Benson declined to write any further Nancy Drew books during the Great Depression. It was quite a story, supported by the letters between Benson and the Syndicate during that time, located in the New York Public Library’s Stratemeyer Syndicate archive.
In writing this article, I had pulled my set of Madge Sterling books off the shelf to peruse and in looking at the condition, sought upgrades at eBay, a site where collectors frequent and can find most anything on any given day. In doing so, I noticed some dust jacket art variants in the series. All three books originally came out with much darker and almost autumnal colors in the cover art and lettering on the covers. At some point, the art on the covers changed with the coloring varying in places and even titles changing color.
I realized that two of my books were printed circa the mid-1930s and the other was from the early printing years of Madge Sterling. So naturally the collector in me had to investigate the color changes I was seeing in my books verses the ones I was seeing on eBay. I made three purchases, so I’d have the full set of six showing the variants. I took photos of the earlier printings together and then the later printings together. Then I took photos of each book with the earlier printing on the left and the later one on the right for each volume.
The first image at the top of this blog shows how they were originally published. All three had orange lettering for the titles and the author’s name on the covers. All three had much darker and even spookier coloring in the background, foliage, and sky. The clothing also had variations in color.
The image right above, shows how the covers were published in later printings – the lettering on Missing Formula and Sundial were more of a red color and curiously the lettering on Deserted Yacht was black. I know that these are later printings because on the back of the books, some of the titles listed were not published until 1935. The earlier printed books as published featured Madge Sterling and Girl Flyers titles on flaps and on back, all published in 1932.
Comparing the covers side by side, for Missing Formula, the earlier book has a lot more orange in clothing and canoe – Jack French’s shirt, Madge’s scarf and the canoe are orange. On the later printing, they were red. The foliage is a much darker color in shades of blues, in the later printing it’s more of a bright green color and the foliage is a lot lighter looking. The former reminds me of a more fall scene and the latter a spring or summer scene.
Deserted Yacht also features orange more prominently than the later printing, and darker colors in the water. Even Madge’s hair looks black and the shore in the back is bluer. In the later printing the water is brighter and blue, the shore in the background green and a lot of accent colors and the boat are red instead of orange. Madge’s hair is brown. Her shirt is blue in the earlier version, green in the later, the jacket also has different shades on each cover.
Sundial shows a much spookier set of foliage and trees – dark in blues, greys and blacks. In the later printing it’s light blue and green and brighter. Madge is sporting that orange scarf in the earlier printing and it’s red in the later printing. Her hair is a little lighter in the later printing. The oar has stripes that are orange in the earlier, red in the later.
Overall, the use of orange and darker foliage is a signature for the earlier printings. The later printings feature red more prominently and much lighter foliage and brighter settings.
The spines of the books in the earlier printings are much darker while the later printings are very light in color.
The book boards in the earlier printings run the gamut of blue to maroon in color in my set. The books in the later printings are a brighter red. I’ve also seen books on eBay without their dust jackets in colors ranging from red to maroon to brown, grey, blue, yellow and green. Goldsmith didn’t stick with any singular color palette, clearly.
The Madge Sterling books were illustrated by Frances Rigney. I’m not sure if the art department at Goldsmith went in and changed the coloring on these covers or if Rigney recolored them at some point. Why Goldsmith changed the coloring in later printings, is an interesting question to ponder. Perhaps they wanted them to be brighter and a little more colorful and not so dark in order to entice readers. It is also possible the cover art was done more as line drawings and then filled in with color by the art department. If so, that could explain the ease with changing all the colors around. Whatever the reason for the changes, this will likely be a mystery that even Madge Sterling - or even Nancy Drew herself, never solved, but it’s fun to speculate and even more fun to be on the hunt to collect these fun variants.
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