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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.
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
As far as I know, there were only two books published. Each was a collection of stories about some guys who got together to do fun stuff. Like using a canoe to build a lake-monster to scare folks, building a rigid balloon (UFO) and flying it over town by remote control to frighten folks...stuff like that. Very humorous and very well written. The one where they haunted the haunted house was quite good as well.
NULL
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.
Either those are old enough to not be under copyright, or else no one cares, because you can get them from web pages. For example, you can get Tom Swift books in Palm DOC format from here:
http://www.dogpatch.org/etext.html#swift.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My favorite was Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, the one where he gained access to this awesome computer. (Lots of blinky lights on the front, and cool spinning tape drives! Woo!) He decided to use it to do all his homework for him. So he spent hours and hours studying his books, and entering data from his books into the computer so it could do his homework. At the end of the novel he realized that he had spent far more time studying and doing data entry than he would have spent just doing the homework, but he now knew the material so well that he totally aced his tests.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
"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!"
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.
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.