Introductions and Welcome

*Please listen to this episode first*
This episode introduces your host, J.C. Rede, and delves into the whys and wherefores of this particular podcast; Sets the goals and defines the journey.

Transcript

0:00

Hi, everyone. Welcome to forward into the past. I am your host JC Rede, and this is our first podcast and it's a very important one. It's the description of the podcast and why I'm doing what I'm actually doing. Now, before we get into the housekeeping stuff, let me fully introduce myself to you. My name is JC, as I said before, and I am a professional voice actor. Now, what does that mean? Well, as the name implies, I am an actor and I use my voice to do stuff like documentaries, phone IVR, explainer videos, narration for film. Video games commercials. And the list goes on and on. One of my favorite things to do is audio book narration. Now, books are one of my passions. A true story. I have been able to read for as long as I can remember. Yeah, I must've been about, oh, about four years old. And I remember sitting in my dad's lap and he would have me read the paper out loud to him. It gave him kind of a giggle. Now by the time I reached kindergarten, I was master of ceremonies for our schools, bicentennial celebration. Yes, I am that old. I really didn't know what was going on to be fair. They just asked me to read from some index cards and stand in front of this microphone. That's about all I knew at the time. But I enjoyed the applause and I got a kick out of it. Now forward a few more years. And I soon realized that what was torture for the rest of my third grade class was like breathing to me. Now think back to your third grade class, you remember when the teacher would go around the room and ask every student to read the next paragraph for whatever story we were reading. Remember your reaction? Yeah, I had the opposite reaction. I was always looking forward to it. I eventually started to read these stories in different voices. Inflections I added comedic pauses. I became a character. I was basically just having fun with it. I didn't know any better. And I just continued that throughout the rest of my schooling. It wasn't really, until I turned 35 that I discovered. Heck, I might be able to do this for a living. Well, I took a course around 2004 in Las Vegas. I finished the course recorded a demo reel and the rest is well, no. Life happened. I got married to a wonderful woman. We moved to Orlando. And I didn't know anybody out here. And then back in 2004, Now internet recording. Wasn't what it is today. So I kind of had to just put everything on pause for a little while. Well, that little while turned into about 15 years. Forward to 2021 Christmas time. And I turned to my wife and say, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and revisit my voiceover career. Well, she turned to me and told me that for Christmas, she got me a course in voiceover. Talk about serendipitous. So I took the course. I finished the course and recorded another demo reel and well, here I am back in the saddle and ready to go back at it. And while I'm waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. I decided that I would put my chops to good use. As I said before, I'm a voice actor and one of my specialties is recording audio books. Well, sadly, I can't just pick some random author's book. Recorded. And put it out there without asking for permission first. Without auditioning and definitely without signing a contract. Yeah. They kind of frown upon stuff like that. So, what do I do now? Well, I thought to myself, where can I get books that I can read to the public? Hey, how about public domain books? So all the stories that you will hear on this podcast are all taken from the public domain library at project Gutenberg. More on that a little bit later, but the important thing to remember right now is that they are all part of the public domain. The copyrights have all expired and they belong to the public. You and me. Now with the thousands upon thousands of books out there, I could literally be here forever and not even get through half of them. So, what do I do? Well, I decided to focus. There are lots and lots of recordings of people reading, literary classics, like pride and prejudice, Dracula Frankenstein, a Christmas Carol, and so on and so forth. You get the idea. I wanted to focus on a more neglected area. Growing up. My favorite books were the Hardy boys mysteries, the three investigators featuring Alfred Hitchcock and encyclopedia brown, boy detective. You see a pattern there. Yup. So my love of detective stories led me down the proverbial rabbit hole, and I ended up smack dab in the middle of the world of the dime novel. Now what exactly is a dime novel? Well, the quick answer is that it was a paperback book. That was devised at the tail end of the 18 hundreds, right around 1860 or so. The more apt description take some time. Well, that is exactly the point of this particular episode. Dime novels first made the scene around the American civil war. It was a cheap way for a soldier to have something to do while he was waiting around for the next skirmish. Right around the mid 1890s, the magazine Argosy was reintroduced to the public in a larger format. Up until then dime novels were actually paperback books about the same size as mass paperbacks are today. But that magazine, Argosy, was printed on larger sheets of paper, but it was still a fairly thick book. Roughly about 192 pages. Our go see, however, was offering something new to the public. A wide variety of stories written by several authors in one magazine for almost next to nothing. It's not difficult to understand the importance of this phenomenon. Up until dime novels were introduced books, although they were plentiful. We're still well out of the reach financially for most of the young working class folk of the industrial revolution. But a dime novel could be had by. Everyone. In the 1860s through the 1890s, most of the stories featured in dime novels were about the Western frontier. Featuring characters like Daniel Boone and kit Carson. But that all changed when our go-see hit the market in the last half of the 19th century. Not long after our go-see began conquering the masses with their offering, the publishing company of street and Smith introduced their weekly magazine. And it was called the popular magazine. And boy, it was popular. And it was around this time that the simple dime novel began to become something entirely different from where it started. Street and Smith's publishing house churned out story after story to feed the growing, working class. And kept strict regulations for their books, but they paid very well. And many, a young struggling author would join their stable of writers. Many times writing under various pseudonyms. Oftentimes one writer would shell out three or four stories under different names in the same magazine. So to the reading public, it would look as if the publishing house had more authors providing excellent stories. Writers like Jack London, Edgar, rice Burroughs, and even Agatha Christie would often write for these dime novels. And enduring characters were first started among their pages. Buck Rogers, Tarzan, conan the barbarian, just to name a few. Now, beginning with street and Smith's the popular magazine. They began to use glossy paper for their covers and featured illustrations that usually had a damsel in distress and a hero terrorized by a villain. The stories began to become more tantalizing, more escapist, and definitely more over the top. And around 1920, the dime novel really hit its stride. It was around this time. That printing presses became more and more automated. Especially steam printers, which the major print houses would employ to keep their operational costs lower. Another one of the ways these print houses kept costs down was in their choice of paper. Back then pretty much the same as today. Magazine covers were printed on high gloss paper. It made for a superior product, caught people's eyes and even allowed for color, which back then was a huge deal. However, even though the colorful covers may have been printed on glossy papers. These print houses opted for the least expensive paper possible to print their stories. The idea was to use cheap paper and fill it with mostly printed text or on occasion, maybe a black and white image. High gloss paper was used by the more highbrow magazines and not just for the covers, but for their printed pages as well. And so people began to call those magazines slicks. Slickers or glossies. Dime novels on the other hand, used really cheap paper, very unrefined stuff. So cheap. That you could still see wood pulp in the pages themselves. And so dime novels over time became known as pulp magazines. And the stories that filled those magazines. Pulp fiction. Yeah. That's where we got the name. Now the heyday of these magazines, whatever you call them was from about the end of world war one, which is around 1920. To about the end of world war II, which is around 1950. During these 30 years, these pulp magazines became sort of specialized. Each publishing house had specific magazines devoted to different genres, like detective stories, westerns adventures, early science fiction, and then stuff. Just a freak you out. As I mentioned earlier, several now famous writers started off as pulp fiction writers. And in this podcast, you will encounter stuff from HG Wells, Agatha Christie, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Azimov. Just to name a few. I'm very excited to share these stories with you. Since many of them have not been seen or heard in almost a century. Now time for a full disclaimer. All of the stories you are about to hear are part of project Gutenberg. As I mentioned earlier, and all of them are available to read and download as eBooks on any browser by visiting their website, which is gutenberg.org org. So if you like, you can find these books and download them yourself and follow along. If you want. What I suggest you do is just visit their website. And if you find something that peaks your interest, go ahead and download it, read it. And Hey, if it interests you enough, send me a note. Maybe I might include it in one of these podcasts. As I said before, all of the books and stories that are found out there on project Gutenberg are out of copyright and therefore in the public domain and absolutely free to distribute. Now that being said, this is again, a very full disclosure. Please remember that several of those stories that you will find out there on project Gutenberg our products of their time. And they may contain themes or ideas that may seem antiquated or flat out just wrong. When you look at them through our 21st century prism. Now I intend on reading those books exactly as they were written warts and all. My suggestion. Try to enjoy them as best as you can. And please try to keep an open mind. Storytelling is fast becoming a lost art, and I feel these stories still deserve to be remembered as a period of time that did exist. One final note. For those of you that found this podcast and thought that I'd be talking about the Firesign theater. Yeah, sorry to disappoint you. I just kind of borrowed that phrase for the podcast, but stick around anyway, I'm going to be reading some detective stories. And of course those stories are the very thing that Firesign theater was parodying. So. Stick with it. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy these stories. And I will try to keep you educated as well as entertained. Any suggestions or comments, feel free to reach out to me. And if you like what I'm doing and sharing with you. Feel free to support me by buying me a cup of coffee, using the link, provided subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Sign up for my email list or visit me on Facebook to keep yourself informed and find out when the next podcast will be released and what it's going to be about. Well, I've talked long enough. Stories should be coming up soon. In the meantime, thank you for joining us on this journey. And let's go forward into the past.