BEHIND THE MICROPHONE
About Continental Radio
Books, voices, and the worlds between them.
FROM PAGE TO AIR
The script desk
The book is adapted into a script for the air — dialogue, cues, and a cliffhanger to close each episode. Each story finds its own shape on the dial.
The repertory company
A company of players, cast to their characters, with the foley table and the orchestra pit close at hand. Who they are is a matter the station has never much discussed.
The transmitter
Episodes are pressed once, given their vacuum-tube warmth, and set on a frequency of their own — there for every listener who happens across the dial after.
What this is
Continental Radio turns books in the public domain into 1930s-style radio serials, mastered until the whole thing sounds like it came off a transcription disc. It began as a father-and-son project to hear the books they love the way 1936 would have broadcast them.
Why the public domain
Every January the copyright clock frees another year of books — whole shelves of mystery, scientifiction, comedy, and adventure that belong to everyone. Those source books remain everyone's to read and reimagine; our adaptations and original plays are separate productions. Listening here is free.
Your own manuscripts
The workshop also adapts original writing. Public commissioning is not open yet; for now, find a story on the dial and settle in.
Keeping the lights on
Radio drama has always been listener-supported, one way or another. Every serial takes real time and care at the workbench. The plan, should this ever outgrow the family workshop:
- The library stays free. Public-domain serials, once pressed, are free to every listener, forever. That's the point of the station.
- Patrons keep the transmitter warm. A modest subscription buys a place near the front of the line, longer works, private commissions of your own manuscripts, and first say in which books the station adapts next.
- The tip jar by the studio door. One-time contributions, acknowledged on the air in true sponsor style: “tonight's episode comes to you through the generosity of a listener in San Francisco.”
- What we won't do: advertisements inside episodes, selling listener data, or charging for books the law has already set free.
The fine print that isn't fine
Our adaptations are credited to Aster Morrow and collaborators. The credit acknowledges a collaboration; it is not a statement of legal authorship or copyright ownership.
No living or dead actor's voice is borrowed or imitated here. How the rest of it is made stays behind the studio door, where it has always been. Episodes play on the station's own set.