By Rebecca Oviedo

Blade and Ledger, September 1926

Every year since 2019 we have delighted in reviewing our Distinctive Collections for new titles entering the public domain to scan and bring to you in our Digital Library each new year. For 20 years prior to 2019, new items to the public domain were restricted due to a copyright extension enacted in 1998. Laura Bang wrote an excellent review and round-up of further reading on the blog in December 2019.

This year we’re adding two works that have been included in two of our online exhibits but could not previously be shared in full due to copyright. Alright, well one exhibit is brand new this year, so it didn’t have to wait very long!

Joining nine other titles already in the public domain by Villanova alumnus, poet, and author Thomas Augustine Daly is A Little Book of American Humorous Verse, published in Philadelphia in 1926. Dedicated “to all lovers of the laughing muse,” T.A. Daly has compiled a selection of light verse by American authors ranging from the well-known and enduring Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to his own friends and contemporaries Christopher Morley, Joyce Kilmer, and of course, himself.

Coming soon is our brand new exhibit, “That Fairyland of Ice”: Polar Exploration in Mind and Memory, which includes Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s 1926 The Adventure of Wrangel Island, from the James Wheeler collection. This copy is inscribed by Stefansson himself to his friend Henry Grier Bryant (1859-1932), a fellow explorer and writer from Philadelphia. Stefansson was a prolific author with 12 other books in the Wheeler collection, many of them also signed copies.

The Cleveland News, May 21, 1926

Of course 2022 also brings new additions to our Dime Novel and Popular Literature collection including these newspapers from 1926: a September issue of Chicago’s Blade and Ledger and a May 21st issue of The Cleveland News. Well into Prohibition, catching my eye in this latter issue is an advertisement for Pabst-ett, “the new finer food that’s more than cheese” from Pabst Brewing Company and an article on the front page reporting on the perjury trial of a Broadway theater producer’s “bathtub party” allegedly at which “pretty Joyce Hawley, Broadway model, ‘entirely undressed,’ splashed merrily in a bathtub of bubbling champagne while a score of men drank from the contents of the tub.”  !!!

Other major titles freely available this year include A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. This past December, The Public Domain Review did a festive advent-style calendar in anticipation of new items in the public domain for 2022. Here’s to a new year!

Rebecca Oviedo is Distinctive Collections Librarian/Archivist at Falvey Memorial Library.

As we previewed last month, this year sees the release of many creative works from 1924 into the public domain in the United States. We’ve started the year by digitizing a few issues from 1924 periodicals, and we plan to add more 1924 content to the collection as the year progresses.

Our initial offerings are the March, 1924 People’s Home Journal, and two 1924 issues of the Weekly Ledger, a retitled successor to the long-running Chicago Ledger. Both of these publications began life in the 19th century as story papers, and our collection includes enough issues to show the significant changes they saw over the years. The twentieth century brought smaller formats, larger page counts, more use of color, and significant changes in advertising strategy. The ability to digitize and share these little-seen and sometimes-fragile issues will make it easier to support the study of the evolution of popular culture during a time of significant change.

A Happy New Year! Comfort, v. XXIII, no. 3, January 1911.

A fun thing to do on New Year’s Day (after a good night’s rest…! 🥳😄) is to see what new stuff is now freely available in the public domain! 2019 saw the first batch of new stuff to enter the U.S. public domain in over 20 years and I’m excited to see more stuff entering the public domain in 2020. On January 1, 2020, most* works published in the U.S. in 1924 will enter the public domain.

If you are not a copyright nerd and/or public domain enthusiast, the public domain is made up of works (books, movies, music, etc.) that are not protected by copyright or other intellectual property laws and are therefore free for anyone to use or reuse. This means that you can build upon these freely available works to create new works. For example, Disney has made tons of movies based on materials in the public domain, especially fairy tales. (On the flip side, Disney has also been heavily involved in lobbying for copyright extensions to make sure that their works are protected for as long as possible.)

Lifehacker has noted a few of the highlights from 1924 that will be entering the public domain, including the Buster Keaton silent movie Sherlock Jr., George Gershwin’s musical score for Rhapsody in Blue, and Agatha Christie’s book Poirot Investigates. Here in Falvey’s Distinctive Collections, we’ve got 93 books in our catalog that will potentially be entering the public domain next year. We’ve always got a lot in our scanning queue, but we’ll make sure to get a few shorter issues of 1924 popular literature periodicals up in early January to celebrate their entry into the public domain!

*U.S. Copyright law is complicated, so you should always double-check the status of works! In particular, audio recordings are governed by an entirely separate set of copyright laws.

Bake a cake to celebrate new stuff in the public domain! This issue of The People’s Home Journal entered the public domain this year. The People’s Home Journal, v. XXXVIII, no. 4, April, 1923.

Further Reading:

Bacon, Thomas. “Characters That Should Be Public Domain (If It Wasn’t For Disney).” ScreenRant. 25 August 2019.

Middleton, Theodora. “Do bad things happen when works enter the Public Domain?” Open Knowledge Foundation Blog. 8 October 2012.

Redmond, Sean. “U.S. Copyright History 1923–1964.” The New York Public Library. 31 May 2019.

“Why the Public Domain Matters.” Duke University School of Law, Center for the Study of the Public Domain. 2019.

And finally, if you’ll be in Washington, D.C., on January 30, 2020, you can attend a Public Domain Day party hosted at the American University Washington College of Law.

These boys are excited to frolic their way into the public domain! (From the cover of Grit (Story Section), August 26, 1923.)

You may have seen a bunch of articles around the beginning of the year eagerly talking about new things that entered the public domain on January 1st, such as this one from The Public Domain Review or this one from Smithsonian Magazine. The Atlantic was so excited about new stuff entering the public domain that they published an article about it all the way back in April 2018.

We joined in the celebrations by scanning a few items published in 1923 over the past couple of weeks. Here they are:

Celtic wonder tales / re-told by Ella Young ; with decorations by Maud Gonne.

Chicago Ledger, v. LI, no. 6, Saturday, February 10, 1923.

Chicago Ledger, v. LI, no. 24, Saturday, June 16, 1923.

Grit (Story Section), v. 41, no. 39, Story Section no. 1493, August 26, 1923.

These are just a few things that we moved to the top of our scanning queue to celebrate their freedom, but of course we have many more titles published in 1923 that can now be digitized when we have time. And we’re already looking forward to scanning titles from 1924 next year!

The opening page of Ella Young’s Celtic Wonder Tales.