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Mad Scientists' Club Returns To Print
Jill Morgan writes "Hi
I think your readers will enjoy finding out that The Mad Scientists' Club by Bertrand Brinley is coming back in print this September. I saw a reader mention it on your book page at
one of the reviews.
This book was first printed in 1965, featuring six junior genuises whose pranks turn the town of Mammoth Falls upside down! You can read more about our new edition (which features text restored from the original manuscript) at from Purple House Press
" I remember reading these as a kid.
I really enjoyed the book. Some truely fun stories, like the bank robbers, or the time the Mad Sciencetis bought the min-sub to use in the local lake.
I guess I'll buy a copy and give it to my niece.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
For those of us who don't know about this series, could you please tell us what it is, maybe some links with more info, and all that fun stuff?
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
It's great to see these books returning to print. They inspired a whole generation of geeks. They don't qualify as great literature, but still... It's nice to see them back. I wonder if they'll influence a whole new generation of geeks this time around...?
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
A while ago I got the following letter from Sheridan Brinley (the heir of the late author of MSC) regarding the republication:
To the Mad Scientists' Club Fans:
The book will be published by Purple House Press www.purplehousepress.com, a publisher created expressly to bring back to you and millions of others the books they remember reading as children. The text will be based on the original manuscripts of the stories, so there will be some differences in words from the Macrae Smith and Scholastic editions. And, passages have been restored that were edited out of certain stories. I have done this to reflect more accurately the style and syntax my father used.
Please let other fans know about this development and encourage them to visit the Purple House Press Web site.
Thank you for your long devotion to my father's works. He wrote these stories for you and for himself, because he was as imaginative and adventurous as the seven characters he brought to life as the Mad Scientists' Club.
Sheridan Brinley
This
I think; been 35 years since I read them! But if memory serves, it seemed the most believable, in merely requiring heating and expanding the cannon to pull the concrete plug. The others were more fun, in some ways, but seemed to require a bit more suspension of belief.
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Infuriate left and right
Disney did their usual job on The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake twenty years ago or so.
The book even has the Charles Geer artwork, but they didn't use the original font.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
i don't remember how many actual physical books were written, the only one i ever saw was the one where they made the monster on the lake and it was remote controlled.
To answer your question, no, it wasn't a formula series, i.e. hardy boys. It was one book with i believe 6 short stories in it, geared towards the nerd kids like me. I feel in love with this book, and it started me on my trek towards nerd-dom on a grander scale.
Basically the plot was that there were these kids in the town of Mammoth Falls that were interested in science, and they would dream up things to do to keep themselves occupied, while at the same time learning about science.
For example, one time they went into an old haunted house and did things to make people think even more that it was haunted, and by the end of the story, the mayer and the chief of police ended up in the house, scared witless. The pranks they pulled were like replacing the picture hangers with electro magnets, controlled in a central location so that when the current was turned off, the pictures would fall onto the ground.
that kind of stuff
~zero
insert clever line here
sig?
I'm thrilled to see that the same reprint house carries The Shy Stegasaurus of Cricket Creek. I loved that book. Now if only they'd bring Secret Under the Sea and The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet back into print...
~sabine
Those were good, but the three investigators were better.
Picture teenage geeks combined with junkyard wars and a few other things i cant event think of.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
A friend of mine quoted a four-line poem from Space Child's Mother Goose ("Probable Probable My Black Hen") on her web page, and Purple House Press sent this letter (discussion accompanies it at that url). While Purple House didn't specifically brandish actual litigation, they threatened to hassle my friend's ISP about the quote (presumably under the DMCA), thus outdoing even the Scientologists (who famously hassled people for posting seven lines from an OT rundown, rather than a mere four lines).
It's nice that these books are back in print but Purple House's behavior bugs me enough that I can't let myself buy anything from them. Sigh.
Funnily enough the mad scientists books are some of the ones I kept from my childhood, and recently (under parental pressure) took them from storage at mom and dads to the overloaded shelves at my apartment. They are great books, and look forward to passing them on to my offspring. Hell, I'll probably re-read them a few times myself before that happens though!
Required reading for any developing geek. Now when are they going to reprint the original Tom Swift?
The ole dry cleaning bag and candle balloon is a classic for generating UFO reports.
Not that I'm suggesting that anyone actually do it...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This reminds me of another series of books that I used to read when I was younger. I was wondering if anyone knew the name. I know this may be offtopic but I had a wave of nostalgia. The series that I read is similar to this though.
It was probably in the Juvenile fiction (or scifi) section of my small library. It was the story of how a boy (the name Alvin sticks in my mind but it might not be that) and his single mother live with this professor. (She works as his maid) The professor makes all these inventions which are really cool like a time machine and an electronic dragonfly that is flown by virtual reality. I think he also invented an X-ray machine to see through walls and I remember once they got lost in a cave. Basically the kid was really curious and he always got in trouble by using these inventions.
These were all separate books. It was a bunch of stories. I would be really greatful if anybody knows what I am talking about. This sounds a lot like the "Mad Scientists" club with the kids theme.
I loved both of those. There was another book I read at about the same time, about 3 kids who had a time machine. The time machine looked like a '50s flying saucer on the cover. I remember the book I had being the second of two, but I could never find the first. I probably checked that book out of the school library 10 times.
Can't remember much about the time machine book now, except the kids foiled some guy's plot to steal a lot of gold, and I think they went back to the Revolutionary War.
Re: book about three kids with a "flying saucer" time machine.
This rings a bell... Was there a sentient wolf, and a "kid from the future"? At one point, one of the kids tries to "stop time" by putting ring over the hour/minute hand of the time control, and it works -- briefly, before blowing a rather large fuse? (I think this was in the Revolutionary War story. And I think the fuse was a foot-thick silver bus bar.)
I recall reading these stories in "Boys' Life", the Boy Scout magazine, way back in the mid '60s or so. They were serialized, and I seem to recall I kept missing pieces of them.
Boys' Life had some decent YA SF from time to time. There was another on-again off-again series about some kids on a multi-generation interstellar ship which is about to reach its destination; they're learning to operate BRTs, "body reaction tools". Think Heinlein's power armor scaled up to about 12 feet tall. This was also mid-'60s.
"The six members of the Mad Scientist Club experiment with new projects which include making rain and launching a flying saucer."
"When the mysterious object that lands in the lake they're fishing on turns out to be a bomb, a group of boys decide to find it themselves since no one pays attention to their story."
Ebay has had some decent auctions recently, but another good resource for used books is Bookfinder. Keyword/author = "Brinley" works well on either site.
-- "Driving drunk on the information superhighway since 1986!"
If my instincts are correct, I believe the movie 'Explorers', starring a young Ethan Hawke, and River Phoenix, was inspired loosely by that book. There's a dialogue glitch in the soundtrack where one distinctly hears one of the characters referred to as 'Hannibal', an MSC cast member apparently played by Phoenix in the film.
I'd love to see a director's cut of that picture. It was hacked all to hell when it was actually released.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Shouldn't that be "I am therefore I Grok"?
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
I shudder to think what would happen to the MSC if the Chief of Police and Colonel March had "all of the lessons from Columbine" at their disposal. Back then, "boys will be boys" was an actual legal dictum that lawyers could offer to judges and actually get their clients off. These guys were using pyrotechnics in several so-called capers.(They blew up the monster in Strawberry Lake at the end.) They seemed dangerously interested in military surplus. Hacking the radio frequencies was second nature to them. All of these actions are dangerous predictors of future Bad People. I wish the book publishers would start reprinting more books about good children who sit still and devote themselves to watching Disney cartoons. If kids must get off of the couch, they might devote themselves to collecting Disney beanbag dolls or maybe those plastic action figures for Disney characters.
First way: I've recently been remembering these books but I had no idea what they were called. I just remembered reading them (especially the UFO story) one time. So now I know the author, book titles, publisher, etc--I can find them and re-read.
Second way: Duh, they are making more.
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324006
Written by the Donald J Sobol, also the author of the "Two Minute Mystery" books.
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324006
I've been thinking about grabbing a set of them for my brother-in-law (he's 14).
Help find a cure for Gidget.
This type of language and attitude is endemic in the Tom Swift series. I remember being shocked a couple years ago when I reread one of my old copies.
As an additional exercise, try and find a copy of Disney's "Song of the South" on VHS.
Help find a cure for Gidget.
Hi All,
Thanks for the nice notes, it is great to see how many people remember these wonderful, unique books. To clear up any confusion, there are four books in the series: The Mad Scientists' Club, The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, The Big Kerplop and an unpublished manuscript titled The Big Chunk of Ice. The first two books contain a total of twelve short stores. The two other books are full length novels.
Our edition of The Mad Scientists' Club marks the 40th Anniversary of The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake appearing in Boys' Life magazine in 1961.
The Mad Scientists series was (so far as I know) just a pair of novels with a total of twelve stories describing the adventures of a group of preteen/young teen nerds, called the Mad Scientists' Club. The stories were generally technology-driven - that is, Henry might built a hot air balloon or a high-end haunted house, and the story would progress from there. I loved these books - so much so, in fact, that my copy of The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club has been read to tatters. I highly recommend either book in the series for the younger reader - it's what gave me my love of technology.
Laugh at this if you will, but my imaginary friends when I was young were all members of the Mad Scientist Club.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Even though we're all probably too old to read these books, I still say we should buy them. The series never sold very well, but it turns the potential geek onto technology like nothing else. I speak from experience on that one.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think we really should try to support quality kids' books like this one. And there's also sentimental value.
No, I am not a Mad Scientist pimp.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Mr. Hicks is still around and Alvin's Secret Code was reprinted by Penguin a couple years ago. It seems to be out of print again, but used copies are easy to find.
Hmmm, here's a good info page--a couple more of the books have been reprinted too:
The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald