This is the source text and source illustrations for producing electronic copies of Wally and the Walnuts. Its home is currently at:
https://github.com/metaeducation/walnuts
The included chapters (in the chapters/ directory) are buildable by the MIT-licensed Softcover system (made by the creators of softcover.io. It can produce PDF, MOBI, EPUB, and HTML format. The specification of the order of chapters is found in the file Book.txt.
(Note: For more details, consult The Softcover Book)
Softcover is built on top of the MarkDown format, which is very close to plain text. It offers some extensions, but few of those extensions are used. The chapters should be easily adaptable to any system that takes Markdown as input--such as Github.io.
Because Wally and the Walnuts is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 4.0, it is encouraged for educators to expand upon or modify the text. Since the book was originally a summer project for 8th grade graduates, it would certainly be interesting to see what contributions students might have to make as well.
Please read the LICENSE text for the specific details of what derivative works are allowed. But in brief: if the purpose is non-commercial and the derived work is shared as freely as it was given, it should be fine.
The original illustrations were drawn in pen with pencil shading. The shading did not show up in the black and white copies of the book that were distributed to economics classes. With the originals lost, the Xerox-quality graphics have been digitally processed to appear more clearly as high contrast on white.
The original cover used the graphic of Wally being hit in the head with a walnut, and having a "Newton's Apple" moment of realization about economics. This graphic was swapped with the one in the chapter on banking with Smidley pointing angrily at Wally...because the graphic is more engaging. New typography for the title using the SAF free font was also added.
Wally and the Walnuts was began in the summer of 1989, and first published in 1991. There were reprint runs in 1992, 1997, and 1998.
A scan of the 1998 edition was made by Brian Dickens around 2002, but wasn't distributed widely--and kept under an All-Rights-Reserved license. The text was given an edit along with updates to the illustrations in 2014 prior to release as a Creative Commons eBook.
In the 2014 release, the chapters on international trade with a "pseudo-Japan" (Napaj) and a "pseudo-communist-era-Russia" (Commland) were not included. The reason was that the illustrations, accents, and characterizations could be seen as being non-politically-correct. They also didn't particularly add anything to students understandings of global economic interdependencies in 2014.
The removal of the two chapters on international trade meant that the epilogue with Smidley having a change of heart came a bit suddenly...right after he had perpetrated a scam. This meant moving the labor dispute later. It might seem nice to end the book after the economic recovery from the depression; but the Savings and Loan scam depends on the government having instituted interest rate controls.
Several edits were made to try and make phenomena that seemed to come out of thin air be more emergent. Rather than someone making a proposal and the whole valley saying "yes, that makes sense, let's do that", the trend would happen naturally. That did mean scaling back on Wally's role a bit as the idea-man. He remains a capitalist, but the idea of starting a bank comes to Bart instead.
A transcription of William G. Tapply's 1969 manuscript is included in the directory /tapply/
The book initially contained chapter questions and a glossary. Concern was that putting these in the text electronically makes it look too much like "work". They are included under the directory unused/ inside of /chapters along with the removed material on international trade.