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I made this LoRA to have fun with and pay homage to a core memory - the Hardy Boys Casefiles. I was in middle school in a tourist town in Michigan when these books were being published monthly. Tourists didn't know\care that empty cans could be turned in for the $.10 deposit… so once a week after school I would walk to our little downtown and try to find empties. The books retailed for $2.75 and came to $2.86 with (at the time) 4% sales tax. So if I could find 29 empties, I could cash them in at the drug store then buy the next book in the series. This was pre screens, smart phones, and world wide web so I cherished the covers and looked forward to when that moment would occur in the book. I especially loved the interconnected block letter logo and even remember drawing it out - love that it resurfaced in the 2020 TV series.
So that was the main goal for this LoRA, being able to prompt and have the prominent logo be consistent. It is for the most part, you can specify gradient colors in your prompt if you want or get something other than the dominant red-yellow. It's fun to add in the bypass and even realism LoRAs but they can spazz out the logo sometimes.
The source is 70 book covers resized\padded to 512x768. Some from image search, lots from https://gellaho.com/book_archives (seriously, thank to that dude), and a couple from my personal collection. Padding to that 2:3 resolution sometimes involved adding 10-20px black side borders and those unfortunately come through pretty regularly.
For captioning, I ran them through Qwen3VL with instructions to
start with "Hardy Boys CASEFILE Number xx cover." but replace xx with the number found in the image. Also refer to the blonde man as Joe and the brunette man as Frank. Include the title, tagline, and author Franklin W. Dixon.
And it worked pretty well. I went through each caption and added corrected title\tagline and character identification. I forgot that for style training, you don't want to have 'illustration style' or things like that in the captions, but some of that slipped through. The condition of the book cover was also included in some cases, so you can prompt for 'worn, vintage look with some visible creases' but also 'vintage, but in brand new condition.'
It's fun to take a caption generated from the reference image, run it without the LoRA, then run it with. The art style varies across the source images, so the LoRA is kind of in the middle of all of them. But it's still fun with the signature logo. Good for a trip down memory lane, I'm going to come up with cheesy taglines for the 66 books from the original Hardy Boys series books and see what the LoRA comes up with. And make dumb covers then troll my family and friends that know I'm a still a big Hardy Boys nerd.
