Carl and Jerry Are Back!
Way back in September of last year, Michael Covington made what at the time seemed like an outrageous suggestion: Gather John T. Frye's Carl and Jerry stories together and republish them in anthology form.
Outrageous, maybe-but for me, damned near irresistible. Carl and Jerry had played an important part in revving my enthusiasm for electronics back in 1963, and I credit my entry into the computer field (which was not inevitable given my degree in English and desire to be a writer) with an enthusiasm for tinkering things up in my corner of the basement. I built my first computer with a wire-wrap gun and a hatful of loose parts, just as Carl and Jerry would done had they been around in 1976.
I'm a book publisher, and the publishing part, at least, was straightforward. Hunting down the rightsholder and getting republication permissions took part of September, but was easier than I had supposed. Scanning articles and artwork from the magazines takes time but is otherwise unchallenging. Manufacturing and order fulfillment were a natural for Lulu, which I had proven out with my modestly successful repub of The New Reformation. The hard part, in fact, was simply laying hands on the magazines themselves.
John T. Frye wrote 119 Carl and Jerry stories, which appeared in Popular Electronics between the magazine's premiere in October 1954 and the end of 1964. I had about 25 of the issues in the basement, which left almost 100 to be found. And so I've been hunting them down since September, primarily on eBay. At this writing, I have all but nine, and I nail one about once a week. Doubtless a few will elude me for a few more months, but I've learned that given sufficient time, almost all human artifacts march past eBay's unblinking eye.
Those 119 stories represent almost 300,000 words and 300 illustrations. That's way too much for a single book, or even two. So what I'm doing is laying them out in five anthologies, chronologically by issue with roughly two years per volume. The first anthology is done and available on Lulu. I'm well along with the second volume, and my schedule for publishing the remaining volumes looks like this:
- Volume 1: 1954-1956 (Released February 2007)
- Volume 2: 1957-1958 (Released March 2007)
- Volume 3: 1959-1960 (May 2007)
- Volume 4: 1961-1962 (August 2007)
- Volume 5: 1963-1964 (October 2007)
All the original illustrations will be included. I did repair a few mispellings and blatant grammatical errors, but I made no attempt to improve Frye's writing, the oddness of which is part of the series' charm.
Although I've mentioned Carl and Jerry here in Contra in the past, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about I suggest reading the appreciation on my new Carl and Jerry page. Basically, Carl and Jerry were two teen boys who used electronics to help people, solve crimes, impress girls, and get out of jams. What set them apart from other teen fiction of the time is that they explained the principles of the electronic devices mentioned in the story. This ranged from Geiger counters to theremins to auto tachometers and lie detectors and a whole lot else. They made it sound easy enough so that young geeks reading the stories (like me, in 1963) would at least give it a try, and I think it's fair to say that a lot of people of my generation chose careers in science and technology in part because Carl and Jerry inspired them to buy a soldering iron and experience it first hand.
My Carl and Jerry page also includes a complete index to the 119 stories, with a two-line capsule summary of each story. Most people remember the stories by what happened more than by title or issue, and this should help people find particular stories that they recall most fondly. There's a short bio of John T. Frye himself, but not much is known about the man, and if you have any additional biographical data I would be very interested in getting it.
This project is in part about preserving a cultural phenomenon that was dispersed across 119 now-crumbling magazines, and very easily lost. But I also think that the idea behind Carl and Jerry was a good one, and I'd like to see the ancient genre of didactic fiction tried again. I may try it myself, and I hope that other writers who understand how Carl and Jerry worked in the minds of young Boomer nerds may attempt to bring it to the current generation. Any takers? Dare ya!