Everybody's Libraries

Mignon G. Eberhart published more than 50 books over a 60-year career, and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1971. Her first novel, The Patient in Room 18, introduces nurse Sarah Keate and her detective boyfriend Lance O’Leary, as they puzzle out what’s behind mysterious deaths in a hospital ward. A 2023 Time magazine panel named it one of the 100 best mystery and thriller books of all time. It joins the public domain in 52 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

By 1929, Arthur Conan Doyle had retired Sherlock Holmes, and his stories had more fantastical elements than Holmes would have put up with. The title story of The Maracot Deep and Other Stories involves encounters with supernatural beings in Atlantis. “The Disintegration Machine”, another story in the collection, and his last featuring Professor Challenger, deals with an invention not unlike Star Trek‘s later transporter. The book joins the public domain in 53 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Warner Brothers’ full-color 1929 musical film On With the Show featured Ethel Waters singing “Am I Blue?”, a song so pervasive that it was also in 3 other films that year. Singers that have since covered this standard include Billie Holiday, Eddie Cochran, Ray Charles, Cher, Bette Midler, and Linda Ronstadt. It’s also been in later films like To Have and Have Not, Funny Lady, and The Cotton Club. The song and the movie it debuted in join the public domain in 54 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

In 1929, just two years after The Jazz Singer introduced synchronized sound to theaters nationwide, The Broadway Melody was released as a full-length movie musical with synchronized sound nearly throughout. One sequence was even in Technicolor.

The movie won the first best-picture Oscar awarded to a sound film. Despite its fame and technical innovation, we won’t see it in its full glory when it joins the public domain in 55 days: the Technicolor version is now lost. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

William Golding called the bipolar Catholic author Graham Greene “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety”. Both Greene’s thrillers and his more serious novels are suffused with concerns of politics and religion, flawed institutions, characters who betray others and their own consciences, and grace and redemption in unexpected places.

His first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929. It joins the public domain in 56 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Emma Willard had remarkable persistence. She founded the first higher education institution for women in America, and appealed tirelessly for its support in multiple states. She wrote textbooks for it that include groundbreaking work in history and graphic design.

Alma Lutz’s 1929 biography of Willard, joining the public domain in 57 days, is titled Emma Willard, Daughter of Democracy. May all American daughters and other children of democracy vote to defend it today. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Virginia Woolf’s classic 1929 essay on feminism and creative work has inspired numerous analyses (like this one), adaptations (like this one), and projects (like this one).

Copyright is one way writers get money, but it often enriches publishers and estates more than it helps creators. We begin this year’s #PublicDomainDayCountdown anticipating Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own arriving in the US public domain in 60 days.