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Monthly Archives: November 2024
Memoir of a deaf-blind woman with many eyes on her
Helen Keller struggled to write the story of her life as an adult. Knowing it had to go through her close associates, she tried to balance her radical politics with broad appeals for support for blind people, omit the role … Continue reading
Hardboiled treasure in the public domain
The hardboiled detective genre arose in Black Mask magazine. Once considered disposable, its pulp issues are now hard to find. Dashiell Hammett‘s first two novels there, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, gained staying power when revised versions came out … Continue reading
Hitty, freed after her first 95 years
In Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, a wooden doll carved in rural Maine travels around the world with a wide variety of owners and outfits. Rachel Field’s novel, illustrated by Dorothy Lathrop, won the Newbery Medal in 1930, and retains … Continue reading
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More water music, and a famous cartoon series debut
“Singin’ in the Bathtub” was Warner Brothers’ answer to rival studio MGM’s “Singin’ in the Rain”. Introduced in 1929’s Show of Shows, it was reused in many later films, including Tweety Bird and Bugs Bunny cartoons. Warner’s very first Looney … Continue reading
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What a glorious feeling, in the public domain
Arthur Freed and Nacio Scott Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain” appears to have first been performed in 1928 in the stage show Hollywood Music Box Revue. Copyrighted in 1929, the song reached movie audiences in The Hollywood Revue, and was … Continue reading
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The hand is quicker than the eye, or the copyright
As Jacob Loshin writes, magicians rely on a distinctive type of intellectual property– their tricks and the secrets of how to do them– that’s usually protected not by copyright or patent, but by informal but strongly enforced community norms. Harry … Continue reading
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“The art of self-tormenting is an ancient one”
Dorothy L. Sayers’ Omnibus of Crime was a selection of the then-still-new Book of the Month Club in 1929. It includes stories of detection, mystery and horror spanning over 2000 years, and opens with an extended essay by Sayers on … Continue reading
I yam what I yam, kinda
Thimble Theatre was a 10-year-old comic with waning readership when its lead character Castor Oyl hired a wisecracking sailor to crew a ship he’d bought. Popeye left after their ocean voyage ended, but audience appeal brought him back after a … Continue reading
The original “Middletown” study in the public domain
In the 1920s, Robert and Helen Lynd conducted a study of white residents of Muncie, Indiana. Their 1929 book reporting on the social dynamics of the town’s “working class” and “business class” became a surprise best-seller, inspired many followup studies, … Continue reading
A Farewell to Arms
“If you look at Hemingway’s prose and the writing he did about war, it was as radical in its time as anything we have seen since,” wrote critic Gail Caldwell, quoted by Thomas Putnam in 2006 in a piece about … Continue reading
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