Why People Still Dig Up The Happy Hollisters And The Trading Post Mystery After All These Decades
The Happy Hollisters books sat collecting dust in thrift store bins for years. Then around 2018, a wave of nostalgia-driven buyers swept through estate sales, and the prices started moving. Most people are looking for the complete set of 47 books. The odd ones out are individuals — usually number 7, which is what we're talking about here. It runs about 114 pages, published by Doubleday in 1966, and it's actually one of the easier volumes to find in decent condition. Here's the thing nobody tells you about finding first editions: the printing history on these books is maddening. Doubleday didn't use line numbers or clear edition statements the way later publishers did. You'll see the mystery title on the frontispiece with the original illustration by Ed Anderson, and that's about it. The real tell is the date line on the copyright page. If it says "First printing" and shows 1966 with no later year, you're looking at a genuine first edition. But even then, there are copies where Doubleday reprinted the same plates later without changing the date. That's the edge case I ran into last spring.
The Happy Hollisters And The Trading Post Mystery
I bought a copy from a seller in Ohio who claimed it was a first edition. The copyright page looked clean, 1966, all the right marks. But when I got it in the mail, the binding felt off. The spine was too crisp, the paper too bright. I pulled out my UV flashlight and checked for any ghosting of later printing dates underneath the surface — a trick some restorers use to fudge the appearance. Nothing showed up, which meant this was probably a later print run on fresh paper, not a fake per se, just misattributed. That cost me $47 and three days of waiting. Since then I always compare the interior paper quality against a known first edition side by side. The original 1966 stock has a slight cream tint that younger reprint paper doesn't match. It's subtle but consistent across all Hollisters first editions. The trading post mystery itself follows the Hollister kids — Andy, Suzette, and Junior — who spot suspicious activity around a Native American gift shop while on one of their RV adventures. Their dad is a diplomat or something similar, which is how they keep ending up in different towns. The plot involves stolen artifacts and a counterfeit ring operating out of the Southwest. It's standard middle-grade fare for the era, but the pacing is tighter than most of the series. Several fans consider it one of the stronger installments. If you're hunting for a copy, Amazon Marketplace and AbeBooks will have listings ranging from about $4 for a heavily read trade paperback to $120 for a near-fine hardcover first edition. eBay tends to have more inconsistent grading. I avoid eBay for anything above $30 because the return process for used books there is unnecessarily adversarial. A small but serious issue with buying secondhand Hollisters is the bookplates. Many copies from library sales or private estates still have ownership stickers or faded library stamps on the front paste-down. These can slash the value by 60 to 70 percent. There's no good way to remove them without damaging the page, so just check the photos carefully before bidding.
Audible has an unabridged audiobook version, narrated by full cast in the style of the later re-recordings. It's not bad, but it adds sound effects and musical cues that aren't in the text. Some purists hate that. I find it fine for background listening but it changes the tone enough that I wouldn't call it the definitive experience. The original text stands on its own.
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Where To Actually Find A Copy Without Getting Screwed
Most used book dealers on major platforms don't specialize in mid-century juvenile fiction, so they'll underprice or overprice based on whatever algorithm is throwing numbers at them. The people who actually know these books are the ones running small Etsy shops or posting on the Facebook group called "Happy Hollisters Collectors." It's a messy group with maybe 400 members, but the sellers there tend to grade honestly because everyone knows everyone's track record. I've been buying from three or four regulars there for years. The one I trust most ships within two days and grades conservatively — they'll call something "good" when other dealers would call it "very fine." There's also a Reddit thread on r/Bookcollecting where Hollisters questions pop up every few weeks. Not the most active spot, but the regulars remember specific editions and can spot a restamped copyright page from a description alone. I've asked there twice and got useful answers both times. If you want the PDF, the book is out of copyright in some territories but not all, and the scanning community for these types of books is scattered. Project Gutenberg doesn't carry it. Archive.org has a handful of digitized copies uploaded by individual users, but the quality varies and they're often scans with skewed pages or missing text. I'd recommend the physical copy if you can find one. The paper quality in the originals matters more than it should — the illustrations have a warmth that flat digital scans flatten out completely.
For readers who just want the story and don't care about collectibility, a used paperback from a thrift store or a used bookstore run will run you somewhere between $1 and $4. The Doubleday paperbacks from the 1970s onward are perfectly readable. The main trade-off is that later printings sometimes had minor text edits, mostly trimming or simplifying dialogue. Nothing that changes the plot, but if you're comparing editions, you'll notice it on page 67 where the original first edition has a line about a desert sunset that got cut in the '74 reprint. The scene still works without it. The series as a whole has 47 titles spanning from 1953 to 1973. If this one catches your interest, the best way into the series is book 1, The Mystery of the Holiday Inn, which establishes the RV setup and the sibling dynamic. From there, book 7 comes naturally after about four or five entries since the character development builds gradually. Reading out of order isn't disastrous — each book is self-contained — but you miss the running jokes between the kids that accumulate over the first dozen volumes. One counter-intuitive point about collecting these: the condition distribution is weirdly bimodal. Most surviving copies are either in near-perfect shape or falling apart. The middle ground — worn spines, loose bindings, faded covers — is rarer than you'd expect. That's probably because the parents who bought these in the sixties and seventies tended to be more careful with children's books than the average kid treated them back then. So when you do find a copy with moderate wear, it's worth checking the interior pages closely. Moderate exterior wear sometimes masks water damage or foxing inside.
I should mention the main downside of this whole exercise. The Happy Hollisters books were printed on acidic paper, which means even well-stored copies from the sixties will yellow and become brittle over time. No amount of careful handling stops that. I've got a first edition of this very book on my shelf that's from 1966 and the pages are already fragile at the spine fold. It's still readable, but you can't leave it open flat for long without risking the gutter cracking further. If preservation is your goal, consider a archival-quality mylar sleeve or a rigid book box. They run about $8 for a set of ten from Gaylord Archival and will buy you another twenty years at least.
