Everybody's Libraries

The depths of the Depression would seem an unpromising time to revive the 1929 song “Happy Days Are Here Again”. But after it was played at the 1932 Democratic convention, it caught on as a song of hope for better things to come. And after years of work and struggle, prosperity returned.

Tomorrow this song and the rest of our #PublicDomainDayCountdown works join the public domain. And while tough times may still threaten, with work, struggle, and hope we too may bring happy days here again.

The Disney studio had a productive year in 1929. Along with releasing 12 new Mickey Mouse cartoons, it began a series of one-shot musical cartoons with animation designed to fit the music, instead of the other away around. The “Silly Symphony” series began with “The Skeleton Dance”, a creepy graveyard cartoon set to music Carl Stalling wrote after Disney couldn’t get rights to Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre. Watchable online now, it rises to the public domain in 2 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

“I was so happy. I was so safe,” laments Lois Farquar to a suitor late in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. But from the book’s start, as she and her fellow Anglo-Irish gentry enjoy parties and dances, their Irish neighbors are fighting for independence from Britain, while they entertain British soldiers sent to suppress the rebellion. Unable to commit politically or romantically, Lois and her family lose much. Bowen’s novel joins the US public domain in 3 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Lynd Ward’s Gods’ Man is a novel without words (apart from chapter titles) about an artist who makes a Faustian bargain with a masked stranger for artistic success. Told in 139 woodcuts, it was the first of 6 wordless novels by Ward, and the first American novel of its kind. Selling well when published in 1929, it influenced artists like Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner, who made graphic novels a genre of widespread ongoing interest. The public domain claims it in 4 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Elmer Rice’s boisterous Street Scene wasn’t easily staged. Though set in front of a single tenement, it required over 30 actors, prompting many producers to turn it down. Rice eventually had to direct the first production himself. But that had over 600 performances on Broadway, won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize, and was later adapted into a film and an opera. A 2013 production staged it in the open on an actual New York street. The play opens in the public domain in 5 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

In 2010 Israel Katz called Abraham Zevi Idelsohn “the undisputed pioneer-scholar of Jewish music”. Part of Idelsohn’s claim to fame is his comprehensive survey Jewish Music in its Historical Development, written while he was cataloging the Eduard Birnbaum Collection of Jewish Music at Hebrew Union College. Covering Jewish music and its various influences from Biblical times to the early 20th century, the book was published in 1929, and joins the public domain in 6 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

In the midst a “cruel land, this South”, Christ makes an unexpected sort of appearance in Countee Cullen‘s long poem “The Black Christ”. It’s one of a number of poems in The Black Christ and Other Poems dealing with faith, injustice, sin, racial violence, and African American experience, among other themes.

The University of Missouri libraries has an exhibit of pages from the book, illustrated by Charles Cullen. The complete book comes to the public domain in 7 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Most Christmas songs Americans are used to hearing on the radio were published after 1929. But most Christmas songs they’re used to singing in church are older. Much of the traditional American repertoire is in George Rittenhouse’s World Famous Christmas Songs, with 74 carols and nativity songs “specially arranged for popular usage in community caroling, school, chorus, church and home”. First published in 1929, and reissued in 1957, it’s in the public domain in 8 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Duke’s Public Domain Day 2025 post discusses René Magritte‘s pipe painting, “La Trahison des Images”, and the difficulty of determining whether US copyright law considers it “published” in 1929, and therefore public domain in 9 days.

A related work we know meets that criterion is his illustrated essay “Les Mots et Les Images”, showing distinctions between words, images, and objects, which his painting also expresses. It’s in the last issue of La Révolution Surréaliste. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

The first musical Cole Porter and Herbert Fields wrote together was 1929’s Fifty Million Frenchmen, whose title alludes to a 1927 song not actually used in the show. The most memorable song it does use is Porter’s “You Do Something to Me”, in which the two main characters confess their mutual beguilement. Among the song’s many covers, I’m personally fond of Sinéad O’Connor’s, which my spouse and I danced to on our wedding day. Song and show go public domain in 10 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown