From Super Fan to Super Historian…The Case of the Missing Documents Or how MWB-HARP Came to Be

To celebrate the 121^st birthday of the original Nancy Drew ghostwriter, Mildred Wirt Benson, I ask you all to join me in fulfilling a legacy that was derailed a bit in the 1990s. Numerous papers highlighting Benson’s career not only in Nancy Drew but her many other books and series found themselves in private hands. Some have thankfully found their way back to the public in archives as some of these collectors are starting to downsize after thirty years.  

I wear a lot of hats in the Nancy Drew Collecting community. Author, researcher, consultant, Nancy Drew Sleuths President, event planner, licensee, Nancy Drew expert and fan. Over the years in this journey to following the clues to Nancy Drew, I have gone from fan of the books to collector of the books, to historian behind the scenes and throughout it all, it has been like trying to solve a puzzling Nancy Drew mystery at times. Especially when delving into the mysterious history behind Nancy Drew and her creators.

I’ve made numerous trips to archives over the last several decades, interviewed former Syndicate employees and ghostwriters and I’ve sleuthed out mysteries behind the scenes – and I often follow in the footsteps of history and of our famous sleuth!

Nancy Drew, though a fictional character created nearly one hundred years ago, has influenced many of her readers and has gone on many great adventures. So many since 1930 – over six hundred mysteries solved. She’s served as a role model to so many kids over the generations and even has inspired the likes of our US Supreme Court Justices. These books have been fun and entertaining, exciting and thrilling mysteries for kids, and even educational at times. They hooked kids to reading and made them fall in love with mysteries, cliffhangers, and saving the world, once case at a time! There is timeless nostalgia in every Nancy Drew book and fans still love to read them, reminisce about their childhood, and even collect pieces of it.

One of the greatest legacies is the fans, who have loved and treasured these books so much, that they have passed them down to their kids and grandkids over the years, helping to keep Nancy’s great spirit alive and giving the publishers a reason to keep reprinting them and keep producing new books in new series as the decades go by.

Part of the nostalgia lies in the fascinating history behind the scenes of the books among Nancy Drew’s creators from publishers to illustrators, to ghostwriters to the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Thankfully a lot of the publishing history of these series and others produced by the Syndicate has been preserved in a large donation from Simon & Schuster in the 1990s of over 300 boxes of materials to the New York Public Library which one can sort through at the Manuscripts and Archives Division. There are even original art paintings and books, though the books have never been made available for viewing by the public yet. There are smaller archives and collections of some material scattered around at various universities, including Harriet Stratemeyer Adams’s own Wellesley College. And some of the people who worked at the Syndicate or for the Syndicate have archives of papers at universities – like Andrew Svenson and Mildred Wirt Benson. Benson’s archive is located at the University of Iowa’s Iowa Women’s Archive in Iowa City, IA.

Thanks to the donation of my Jennifer Fisher Nancy Drew Collection of over 5000 items in 2019 to the Toledo Public Library, we have begun to build up a wonderful archive of Benson’s original papers and items related to Nancy Drew plus other books and series written by Benson. The library has a Rare Book Room sponsored by The Toledo Blade up in their local history wing of the 3^rd floor, which is an amazing archive of local history, documents, art and original books. In the early 2000s the library acquired a full set of Benson’s 135 published books from collector Rick Sayers, a founding member of Nancy Drew Sleuths, and it is housed in the Rare Book Room. Also housed there are items from an estate sale of Benson’s only daughter, including Benson’s application for NASA’s journalist in space program plus awards and other ephemera.

Part of my mission, officially launched as MWB-HARP (Mildred Wirt Benson – Historical Artifacts Recovery Project) in 2025, is to play detective much like Nancy Drew and seek out original documents and letters related to Benson – many of which were sold in those 1990s sales. We have begun to reclaim quite a few of these documents in large part thanks to collectors, who have had them for around 30 years now, some just collecting dust on shelves or hiding away in filing cabinets, not living their best life. Now they can be preserved and properly archived for future generations of fans and scholars, so that the legacy of Nancy Drew and Benson among other creators will be preserved and can live on infinitely. It has become my mission in life to see every bit of it returned to these archives.

How can you help? If you own any original letters or documents related to Benson’s personal life, journalism career, writing career, etc. we would love to help you get these into archives – either in Iowa or Toledo so they can live their intended life and preserve history and this great legacy. Copies would be wonderful to create a record, but we’d prefer sales or donations if possible. It can be done!

In order for the library to be able to purchase items for the archives, please support the Nancy Drew Fund at the Toledo Public Library which helps us acquire these original documents or ephemera not in the collection. It also helps the collection grow and be archived, digitized among other collection goals.

I want to highlight some of the great items we’ve added to the collection in Toledo in the last year thanks to MWB-HARP and collectors who were willing to join in on this adventure to sleuth out historic ephemera and preserve it. Please see images (click for larger views) at the end of this blog of items listed below:

- 2 pages of a 3-page plot Mildred Wirt Benson sent to Edward Stratemeyer in the late 1920s which I personally acquired and donated at the 95^th Anniversary ND Conference in Toledo

- Nancy Drew Files Ghostwriter Vicki Berger Erwin’s manuscript and other associated letters and ephemera for Nancy Drew Files #83 Diamond Deceit

- Nancy Drew Notebooks #11 Pen Pal Puzzle painting from collector Victoria Broadhurst

- Nancy Drew Files painting for #38 The Final Scene from collector Ilana Nash

- Nearly 3 dozen publisher letters, royalty statements related to Benson’s own books and series including Penny Parker and her scout series

- MWB Signed Pirate Brig book

- Numerous articles, letters, signed books, photos and other memorabilia from close friend and Toledo Blade coworker, Nancy Hawkins

- Original Nancy Drew Reporter movie poster from Geoffrey S. Lapin

- Contents of Benson’s Toledo Blade desk, Penny Parker outline, St. Nicholas bound volume with her first published short story, The Courtesy, and more ephemera from Geoffrey S. Lapin

- Letter from author Leslie Garis to MWB, Garis’s grandfather Howard was a prolific ghostwriter for the Stratemeyer Syndicate as was her grandmother Lilian. From Collector Ilana Nash.

- Letter from Syndicate partner Andrew Svenson to MWB about her writing for the Dana Girls series. From Collector Ilana Nash.

- Framed Nancy Drew model shot for The Clue in the Broken Locket (Nappi 4^th art)

And there is more to come as soon a we get more donations for the Nancy Drew Fund at Toledo Public Library. If you’d like to help us acquire important pieces of Nancy Drew’s history and the life and career of Mildred Wirt Benson, please donate to the Nancy Drew Fund and be a part of helping create this great legacy. See below for details on donating to the fund.

I cannot think of a better way to spend my final decades on this earth in collecting, researching, writing and building this legacy for the ages. And thanks to the Nancy Drew community, we can do it and solve the case of the missing documents!

To donate to the Nancy Drew Fund, you can click here to donate online, or you can send a check payable to the Library Legacy Foundation with the memo line stating, “Nancy Drew Fund” and send it to the following address:

Library Legacy Foundation

The Nancy Drew Fund

325 N. Michigan Street

Toledo, OH 43604

If you have documents and ephemera you would like to donate or sell, or at least provide copies of, please e-mail me at nancydrewsleuth@aol.com or reach out via my PO Box at:

Jennifer Fisher

P.O. Box 511

Higley, AZ 85236-0511

The Case of Mildred Wirt Benson’s Biggest Fan & Friend - Geoffrey S. Lapin

Geoff's article, The Ghost of Nancy Drew, published 1989, Books at Iowa 

It was at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library in the 1960s that youngster Geoffrey S. Lapin found himself in the reference department. Shelves of bibliographies - many of them author bibliographies - tempted him. Curious about the authorship of his favorite series books like Nancy Drew, he found himself pulling volumes off the shelf, including the Cumulative Book Index and Durward Howes' American Women 1939-1940.

Intriguingly, inside the Cumulative Book Index, when he looked up Carolyn Keene, someone had left a penciled notation – see Mildred Augustine Wirt in the Durward Howes volume. While the identity of this mysterious pencil-inner is the stuff of legends, the finder of the notation, Geoff, would go onto be infamous in the Nancy Drew collecting world.

Geoff had just stumbled upon a rabbit hole of knowledge and down it he went. Grabbing the volume of the Durward Howes volume, he found Wirt listed and hordes of pen names among her own names from Wirt to Benson and began compiling a list of all the various books and series she wrote.

Then came the really fun part when he ventured out to a plethora of amazing used and antiquarian bookshops to find some treasures. Armed with bags full of the adventures of Penny Parker, Penny Nichols, Madge Sterling and many others, he set out to read them all.

And in vicariously enjoying the adventures of all of these series book heroes and heroines, he realized, not only was Wirt (now Benson) and amazing writer, but she was behind so many pseudonyms, and he now had an amazing list of over 130 books she’d written.

Several years later, he found himself on a bus to Toledo to visit Benson at the Toledo Blade, where she was working as a reporter. It was 1969, and Saturday Review had just recently published an issue with an article on The Stratemeyer Syndicate by Arthur Prager in which it stated that Harriet Adams had written books that Geoff knew Benson had written, thanks to all his sleuthing. Someone had to get to the bottom of this mystery!

Off the bus he went, headed to downtown Toledo to the Toledo Blade and he met Benson, the not-so-grandmotherly Carolyn Keene. More like a very ballsy blunt Carolyn Keene who lived a life of adventure and was an amazing writer and journalist. She took off her scarf and opened a drawer, and there sat that very issue of Saturday Review. Things were about to get very interesting!

From that point onward, Geoff became friends with Benson, championed her writing, researched and wrote numerous articles on her and other related Nancy Drew topics even meeting the family of Edward Stratemeyer. He even traveled by small plane to an island to interview Russell Tandy Jr., son of the first illustrator of the Nancy Drew books, Russell H. Tandy. He fired off letters to magazines and newspapers who ran articles with a more Syndicate slant, as if the ghost writers didn’t exist. He wanted to correct the record and felt Benson deserved credit for what she had done.

By the end of the 1970s and 1980, the publishers of Nancy Drew were headed to court, to battle over the copyright to Nancy Drew and publishing rights. Geoff was there, front and center to take in all the drama that ensued in Federal District Court in Manhattan, NY. He loves to quote Harriet Adams who looked at Benson on the day she arrived to testify and said, “I thought you were dead!”

The 1980s brought articles in publications like Yellowback Library and Geoff shared his knowledge and research with other collectors and fans. Then in 1993, the University of Iowa held a Nancy Drew Conference bringing over 500 fans and scholars to Iowa City, IA, where Benson had gotten her Bachelor’s in English and was the first person to get a Masters in Journalism in 1927. Geoff was there to support Benson who was to be honored with a distinguished alumni award among other fanfare.

After receiving worldwide recognition as Carolyn Keene, Geoff’s crusade to help Benson get recognition mostly complete, they settled into a comfortable friendship in the remaining years of her life with Thanksgiving visits and lots of letters between them over the years. When Benson passed away in May of 2002, that summer The Blade held a memorial for her at The Toledo Club. Geoff spoke to those in attendance about what an amazing woman, writer, and friend Benson was, even regaling the audience with amusing tales about her infamous driving exploits.

Geoff’s knowledge and research have been an amazing part of her legacy, and he’s built his own legacy over the years. He donated some wonderful items in the summer of 2025 to the Toledo Public Library including a 1930s Nancy Drew movie poster plus the contents of Benson's desk at the Toledo Blade when she passed as well as a Penny Parker outline, her first short story (The Courtesy) in a St. Nicholas bound volume, and other ephemera you can visit at the downtown branch. His papers and research will one day live in infamy at The University of Iowa, the Geoffrey S. Lapin Papers. where scholars and fans can learn more about his journey in helping to discover the identity behind the mysterious pseudonym Carolyn Keene. This is a legacy well-earned and deserved. Millie would be proud! 

Cupcakes celebrating Millie's 120th, Indianapolis 2025