Category Archives: publicdomain

HathiTrust has created a 1930 Publications Collection for Public Domain Day. It already has over 20,000 items opened, many by their Copyright Review Program, which finds works without copyright renewals. Over 50,000 more items will open in 14 days, including … Continue reading →

Duke’s Center for the Public Domain has its Public Domain Day post out, listing many works joining the public domain in 2026, and explaining the complicated factual and legal determinations sometimes needed to verify their status. Among the listed artworks … Continue reading →

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud turned his psychoanalytic attention from the troubles of the individual to those of the world. The book, joining the US public domain in 16 days in both German and English, diagnoses inherent conflicts … Continue reading →

Franz Kafka‘s work is now known around the world, but it couldn’t be read in English until after he died, and there’s still limited access to good English translations of much of his work. The English Kafka books I list … Continue reading →

The Cat Who Went to Heaven is among the early Newbery medalists that have aged the best over nearly a century. As Derrick Robinson describes, Elizabeth Coatsworth’s story, drawing upon Buddhist legends, shows the characters’ unfolding empathy and compassion leading … Continue reading →

Games can’t really be copyrighted as such, but their texts and visual elements can be. That leaves some games in an intellectual property limbo, like Camelot, a strategy game published in 1930 that’s now long out of production. Today’s fans … Continue reading →

Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams‘s germinal account of the settlement house movement she helped found, supporting immigrants and low-income urban residents. In 1930, Addams published her memoir of the next 20 years, describing her further involvement in Hull-House, … Continue reading →

Few humor books from 1930 still get laughs from many people now, but 1066 and All That does. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman don’t just send up English history: they also satirize how history is often taught and … Continue reading →

This blog’s #PublicDomainDayCountdown focuses on works joining the public domain in the United States, but there are also many other works joining it in other countries. Many are described in Wikipedia and in the Public Domain Review. There is some … Continue reading →

There’s something magical about Swallows and Amazons. It’s not anything supernatural or melodramatic, but as the Vacuous Wastrel notes, the book enchants readers with three worlds: the world of lake and islands that six children explore remarkably independently, the world … Continue reading →