Everybody's Libraries

The first all-talking feature wasn’t a prestige film, and initially wasn’t even meant to be a feature film, but the gangster movie Lights of New York grew in the making, and its box office success helped convince studios to completely replace silent films with “talkies”. Online, you can peruse Warner Brothers’ newspaper-like pressbook promoting the movie, and read film historian J. B. Kaufman on how its production broke new ground. It joins the public domain in 9 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Poet and novelist Claude McKay had an unusually wide influence. This review by John Lowney cites his connections with Caribbean, American, and West African literary communities, the Harlem Renaissance, the Communist International, and the Catholic Worker, and briefly notes gay aspects of his life and writings. Lowney credits McKay’s Home to Harlem as the first novel by a Black writer to make it onto major US bestseller lists. It joins the public domain here in 10 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Thomas Hardy grew famous for his novels in the 19th century, but he considered himself primarily a poet, publishing over 1000 poems in his lifetime. He finished the manuscript to his last collection, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres, shortly before he died in the winter of 1928. Matthew Shaw, whose library owns and has digitized it, writes about it here. Hardy’s ashes are in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. His last book joins the US public domain in 11 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Grace and Carl Moon met at the Grand Canyon in 1909, and quickly bonded over a shared interest in indigenous peoples of the American southwest. They wrote and illustrated children’s books sympathetically portraying Native characters, often with Native girls as protagonists. My wife Mary put one of them online 15 years ago during the long US public domain freeze. We’re happy that their Newbery honor winner, The Runaway Papoose, joins it in the public domain in 12 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

François Villon’s 15th century French songs and John Gay’s 18th century English “Beggar’s Opera” are among the sources Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill used to create Die Dreigroschenoper, a musical play that premiered in Berlin in 1928. It won fame in English as The Threepenny Opera, and its songs “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“Mack the Knife“) and “Seeräuberjenny” (“Pirate Jenny“) are widely known and sung. The original German score joins the public domain in 13 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Eugene O’Neill won his third Pulitzer prize for Strange Interlude, a two-part, nine-act play taking place over 20 years, with themes including sex, infidelity, abortion, and eugenics, and featuring frequent stream-of-consciousness asides and soliloquies by the characters. It was a hit in New York, banned in Boston, parodied by Groucho Marx, adapted for film and broadcast, and still revived (usually in shortened form) on stage. It joins the public domain in 14 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

In 1926, Henry Beston began a two-week stay at a cottage he’d put up on Cape Cod, but “as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.” Beston’s notes from an eventual year at the cottage became The Outermost House, a classic memoir of nature and solitude joining the public domain in 15 days. The sea claimed his house in 1978, but others like it remain available for artists’ retreats. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

The legend of the hejnał, a trumpet call cut short as its player was shot by invaders in the 13th century, is now a Kraków tradition. There’s no known written record of it, though, prior to The Trumpeter of Krakow, an adventure story by American journalist and teacher Eric P. Kelly that won the Newbery in 1929. It’s unclear if it’s a story Kelly heard in Poland, misheard, or made up, but his book is still read and appreciated, and joins the US public domain in 16 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

There’s a long-running comic strip character soon joining the public domain who’s not a mouse. Tim Tyler’s Luck first appeared in 1928, drawn by Lyman Young (older brother of Chic Young, later known for Blondie). We first see Tim in an orphanage, but he would soon have adventures all over the world. King Features, which renewed its initial copyright, syndicated it to newspapers for decades. Its run finally ended in 1996; copyright to its first strips ends in 17 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown