Interesting works that entered the public domain in 02021, in the US and elsewhere

Kragen Javier Sitaker, 02021-11-20 (updated 02021-12-30) (15 minutes)

Writing Some notes on reading parts of Reuleaux’s engineering handbook I learned that the 01924 Sixth Edition of the Machinery’s Handbook has finally served its sentence of copyright and graduated into the public domain. It occurred to me to check what else had recently thus graduated, in 02021 and 02020.

Evidently there was a 7-volume Machinery’s Encyclopedia, also by Oberg and Jones, but unfortunately only Volume 7 seems to be in the Archive so far, and that one is scanned by Google, though it was less ineptly carried out than the great mass of Google’s book scans. It is the “Index and Guide to Systematic Reading”. Strangely, the Encyclopedia, or at least that volume thereof, seems to be devoid of illustrations.

Oberg died in 01951, but his coauthor Franklin Day Jones didn’t die until 01967. As I understand it, this means that, in countries that sentence copyrighted works to life plus 70 years, and do not observe the rule of the shorter term, even the 01914 First Edition of Machinery’s Handbook will not be set free until 02037. Argentina and the EU do observe the rule of the shorter term, for example, but Germany does not.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Barsoom stories call attention; though they were published since 01925, Burroughs has been dead since 01950, so in countries that limit copyright to life plus 70 years, they are now fair game. Similarly Shaw; Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984; Olaf Stapledon; Rex Ingram’s The Prisoner of Zenda, the first Ruritanian fiction; all of Korzybski’s œuvre on General Semantics; Edna St. Vincent Millay; and Schumpeter. Gurdjieff died in 01949, and so did Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind) and Richard Strauss.

In countries that limit copyright to life plus 50 years, the work of everyone who died in 01970 has now graduated into the public domain, notably Carnap, Russell, E. M. Forster, Jimi Hendrix, Mishima, Nasser, Rube Goldberg, and the Death be not Proud of Gunther. Adorno, Eisenhower, Gropius, Kerouac, Meher Baba, and John Wyndham died in 01969. Unfortunately of these only Nasser is actually from such a country, so this doesn’t help those of us laboring under more oppressive copyright regimes, even if they observe the rule of the shorter term. Taiwan, New Zealand, Thailand, Qatar, the UAE, Tunisia, Bolivia, Iran, and the PRC are notable bright spots here, and Mexico observes life + 50 for deaths before 01944-01-01, and Russia and Switzerland, 01943-01-01. India and Venezuela are currently life plus 60 years.

And Tom Lehrer effectively released all his songs to the public domain in 02020, using his own website.

The rule of the shorter term has liberated all US works published up to 01925 (and, less significantly, all works published up to 01925, for users in the US); in 02021, that gave us The Great Gatsby, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys, and in 02020 Burroughs’s Tarzan and the Ant Men, Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk. The Boxcar Children was published in 01924, and The Velveteen Rabbit in 01922. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt also seems to be popular, and his Main Street was published in 01920. Not until 01926 would The Sun Also Rises and Winnie-the-Pooh appear (which last was published first in England), and we don’t get The Sound and the Fury or A Farewell to Arms until 01929.

In nonfiction, 01925 gave us Ronald A. Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers, in which frequentism was born; Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public, on Mussolini’s manipulation of public opinion, proposing the agent/bystander dichotomy; Napoleon Hill’s The Law of Success, from which the entire genre of soft-headed modern self-help books derives; The Bolshevik Myth, by anarchist Alexander Berkman, who committed suicide in 01936, who was the lover Emma Goldman’s, who died in 01940, written after he was deported to Russia, following Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. 01924 gave us Haldane’s Daedalus; Crookshank’s virulent pseudoscientific racist The Mongol in our Midst; and the Lessons of October and New Course by Trotsky, assassinated 01940. 01923 gave us Santayana’s epistemological Scepticism and Animal Faith, Henry Smith Williams’s ten-volume Story of Modern Science, the first two volumes of Churchill’s World Crisis, Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion, and Jepson’s Manual of the Flowering Plants of California.

01922 gave us Liddell’s Handbook of Chemical Engineering and Born’s _Einstein’s theory of relativity.

H.G. Wells was English, mostly published first in England, and died in 01946, so his works have mostly been in the public domain since 02016, since the UK sentences works to life + 70; this notably includes his 01919 Outline of History, which rejects racism. In 01924 Wells published A Year of Prophesying, a compilation of his columns. The Everlasting Man, published in 01925, was by Chesterton, who was also English, but who died in 01936; it is a rebuttal to Wells’s Outline.

The US doesn’t observe the rule of the shorter term for works published in 01926 to 01977 unless they were in the public domain in their source country on 01996-01-01, so I think Wells’s post-01925 works are not yet free in the US, but Chesterton’s are. (Churchill and Eliot didn't die until 01965.)

Other public-domain works that catch my eye in the Archive:

Topics