Everybody's Libraries

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.

Just two months from now, much of the world will celebrate another Public Domain Day, welcoming a year’s worth of works into the public domain. Many countries that have had life+70 years copyright terms for a while will get works by authors who died in 1954. Those still fortunate enough to still have life+50 years terms will get works by authors who died in 1974. The rules in the United States are more complicated, but we’ll have nearly all our remaining copyrights from 1929 expire. That means that, for us, essentially all of the publication history of the “roaring 20s” will be public domain when the new year arrives.¹ That’s a wide sweep of culture available for everyone to enjoy, share, build on, and reuse.

The Twenties encompass the start of national women’s suffrage, the rise of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, and the dawn of “talking” motion pictures, and extend to the “Black Tuesday” stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Twenties had political upheaval to match the cultural and economic upheaval, including civil war in Ireland and many other places around the world, the birth of fascism in Europe, and the revival and decline of the Ku Klux Klan as waves of anti-immigrant and racist sentiment washed over much of America. But the decade also saw widespread international efforts to try to end war generally among nations. While the 1928 pact that many nations signed on to has often been viewed as a failure for not preventing World War II, it set a precedent for later international cooperation and peacekeeping efforts that can be credited with more success.

As I have in past years, I’ll be featuring a Public Domain Day countdown in the days leading up to New Year’s Day 2025, each day featuring an interesting work that will be joining the public domain then. You can follow it on this blog, or using RSS readers or social media that can connect with this blog. That includes Mastodon and other “fediverse” sites that connect with Mastodon using the ActivityPub protocol. I’ll also boost or link to the daily posts from my Mastodon account. (Most of the posts will have 500 characters or fewer, the size of a typical Mastodon post; a few may be longer.) You might also be able to follow my boosts and links from Bluesky (since my account is hooked up to Bridgy Fed), as well as possibly from Threads if they’ve enabled following Mastodon accounts. (That was on their roadmap for 2024, but I don’t know if it’s working yet.) My posts will include the hashtag #PublicDomainDayCountdown. I’ll be focusing on works joining the US public domain that are of interest to me, but you’re also welcome to post about works of interest to you joining the public domain where you are, and use the same hashtag if you like.

Right now for me, and for many others I’ve talked to, it’s hard to think much beyond next Tuesday. But I hope these posts help us anticipate some good things coming in the future, built on the knowledge and creativity of the past. May we all see and help bring about a better future in the days to come!

1. The rules in the US are different for unpublished works, and for sound recordings that aren’t part of motion pictures. (I told you US copyright law was complicated.) But this January 1, along with publications from 1929, we will be welcoming sound recordings released in 1924 (which have a 100-year term) into the public domain, as well as many unpublished works by people who died in 1954. For lots more details and special cases, see Cornell University Library’s public domain table. ↩︎