John T. Frye’s Carl and Jerry, from Popular Electronics – now a book!

John T. Frye’s Carl and Jerry, from Popular Electronics – now a book!

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We have been re-posting Carl and Jerry stories for awhile here on MAKE and I really hoped something like this could happen, Jeff Duntemann managed to get permission to republish them and now you’ll be able to get all of these wonderful stories!

Jeff writes…

Back in 2006, I tried to locate a few of my favorite Carl and Jerry adventures, and discovered that old back issues of Popular Electronics are not easy to come by, and not always cheap. Being a technical book publisher in my day job, I had the notion that an anthology of Carl and Jerry stories would be a good thing to put together, before the old magazines either crumbled to dust or ended up in landfills as their owners passed on. After all, the first Carl and Jerry story–in the very first issue of Popular Electronics–is now over half a century old. Time flies when you’re down in the basement building things, sheesh.

So I located the owner of the Carl and Jerry copyrights, and obtained permission to republish them in anthology form. As I cornered an ever-larger pile of the magazines on eBay, I realized that a single book would not do it. There are 119 stories in all, representing close to 300,000 words and 300 illustrations. So over the course of 2007 I will be publishing five anthologies, and together they will include every Carl and Jerry story by John T. Frye, including all the original illustrations. The stories will be published in chronological order, by issue date.

The first book is now available, and the others are well along.

From 1954 through 1964, Popular Electronics published 119 adventures of Carl and Jerry, two teen boys with a passion for electronics and a knack for getting into and out of trouble with haywire lashups built in Jerry’s basement. Better still, the boys explained how it all worked, and in doing so, launched countless young people into careers in science and technology. Now, for the first time ever, the full run of Carl and Jerry yarns by John T. Frye are available again, in five authorized anthologies that include the full text and all illustrations. This volume of 27 stories is the first of the five, and the remainder will be published over the course of 2007.

John T. Frye’s Carl and Jerry, from Popular Electronics – Link & get it at Lulu.

Thanks Jim!

3 thoughts on “John T. Frye’s Carl and Jerry, from Popular Electronics – now a book!

  1. skabdude says:

    mmmmmmm! Bosco!….oh….oops. It’s a dog…

  2. DiscGolferPro says:

    Thanks for the time and effort collecting the stories. I just received the first volume and I’m enjoying it tremendously!

  3. Robert Shaver says:

    In about 1963 or 4 I built my first robot based on a Carl & Jerry story. They didn’t call it a robot back then. It was a wheeled device that, in a dark room, would turn and roll toward a bright light. My version was based on a toy tracked tank with a motor to drive each track. I used two photocells driving two DC amps (two discrete transistors as a Darlington pair). The cell on the left drove the right track and the cell on the right drove the left track. Simple … but a miracle I get it to work at all. I picked the circuit because it had the fewest parts. I knew nothing about gain or even algebra yet. I think I may still have those Popular Electronics magazines tucked away somewhere.

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