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[Update, 8:32 a.m. EST: I’ve added new material to the bottom of this post.]
We talk about immortal literature, but the vast majority of books are as mortal as we are. Who here has read John Cleveland? He was the most popular poet of his era, with numerous editions of his work published during his lifetime and just after. Then his style went out of style, as did his Royalist sentiments. Bye-bye, Cleveland.
It happens. You wouldn’t believe how many authors were left gasping on the beach when the tide of 1920s experimentalism ebbed—not that you could tell, looking at a bestseller list, that they’d ever been in print in the first place. When I was young, paperback gothics and nurse novels and books of poetry by Rod McKuen were all over the racks, but they disappeared like the passenger pigeon. More recently, the collapse of the horror boom left a lot of authors with nowhere to go.
Let us consider the Cader Books website, where they’ve put up the bestseller lists from 1900 to 1995. Reading through the lists makes an interesting exercise:
Which books have you read, from what years? Did you read them for a class, or for fun?Which books have you heard of but not read? If you’ve heard them referred to in the past, did you recognize the reference as the title of a book? Do you know the title only because it was reapplied to something else—a movie, a TV show, the name of a nightclub, miscellaneous other?
Which authors are you familiar with? Which authors have you heard of? Did you hear about them for something other than writing yon bestselling book?
Do you own any of these books? How many of them have you seen on a bookstore shelf within the last couple of years?
Tell me again how unjust it is that your own books are out of print?
(If you want to get a little more perspective on a given year, go to Wikipedia’s List of years in literature, though Wikipedia’s list of significant books for that year won’t match the bestseller list. You may also be able to find information on more recent bestsellers at the Bestsellers database.)
The literature taught in schools is that which has survived: a collection of gross statistical anomalies. This is misleading. Falling out of print is a book’s natural fate. We can belatedly train ourselves to believe that this will happen to other people’s books. What’s hard is for writers to believe it will happen to their own.
It’ll happen just the same. It happens faster in mainstream fiction than it does in Our Beloved Genre, more slowly for nonfiction history books, very fast indeed for computer manuals; but in the end, all but a very few titles will be forgotten. Just look at the authors in that collection of bestseller lists. You’re a literate bunch, but have you ever heard of Harold Bell Wright? How about Mazo de la Roche? Mary Roberts Rinehart, Lloyd Douglas, Irving Bacheller, Frank Yerby, Coningsby Dawson, Warwick Deeping? These were all notable authors in their day. Some of their books were no better than they should be, while others were genuinely praiseworthy; but all of them spent some time perched on top of the commercial heap.
All gone, now. We shall none of us escape obscurity.
Consider, then, the duration of copyrights. They’ve gone from 28 years renewable to 56, then 28 renewable to 95, to life of the author plus 70. Given the range of human lifespans and the extreme rarity of prepubescent authors, you can pretty much figure that by the time a 95-year copyright runs out, the author will be dead and gone, and any offspring will have reached their majority. You can’t exactly draw a line, but somewhere in there, copyright stops being about directly rewarding an author for his work. What’s left is an intangible time-travelling value: the hope of being read.
This is why it pains me to hear respectable minor authors going on about how the extension of copyright to life of the author plus 70 years is a victory for the little guy. It isn’t, unless by “little guy” you mean the heirs of the author’s ex-spouse’s step-grandchildren by her third marriage. The real push behind the last round of copyright extensions came from the big entertainment combines. They’re bitterly opposed to the idea that cash-cow properties like Winnie the Pooh might ever go out of copyright.
Hollywood’s real attitude toward copyright is that it’s one more useful tool for gaining control of intellectual property. When I was a sprat, and Martha Shwartz was explaining copyright to me in terms of things to watch out for when copyediting, she used the Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes estate as real-world example.
Conan Doyle’s work was out of copyright, she said, but the estate was still combative about anyone using the works, characters, images, et cetera; and so they had to be tiptoed around. Furthermore, she said, images associated with Sherlock Holmes which originated in the movies, not the books—f.i., the deerstalker cap and the calabash pipe—belonged to whomever owned the rights to the 1940s Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies. She said she knew of a case where someone had written a novel in which there was a Victorian detective, not explicitly identified as Sherlock Holmes, who wore a deerstalker cap and smoked a calabash pipe. One of the studios had taken some kind of legal action, and required that the book be rewritten.
I dutifully remembered all that. Years later, I took great pleasure in letting Martha know that those traditional images of Holmes did not originate in the 1940s filmed versions. The deerstalker cap was bestowed on Holmes by Sidney Paget, one of his early illustrators. The deerstalker cap was perpetuated by actor William Gillette, who played Holmes onstage from 1899 to the 1930s, and also was responsible for giving Holmes his curved calabash pipe. I don’t know which studio it was that harassed the house where Martha’s friend was working, but they were asserting rights they manifestly didn’t own.
(“I’ve seen other cases like that,” Teresa said briefly, biting her tongue.)
But I nearly digress. Hollywood and Sherlock Holmes are the big guys. Very few of us are big guys. We’re minor and less-minor and respectable-in-our-day authors. Nobody’s going to contribute heavily to elected officials’ campaign funds in order to get laws passed that will enable them to retain control of our works. All we have to shoot for is the hope of being read.
Life of author plus 70 years does squat for your chances of being read. The knowledge of books and publishing possessed by the aforementioned heirs of the ex-spouse’s step-grandchildren by her third marriage usually boils down to, “No one would have thought Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats would be worth a lot, either.” They’ll turn down a proposal to do a nice little reprint project (not a lot of money in it, but everyone involved read the books when they were kids, so they’re fond of them) that would be just the thing to revive a little interest in your work. Why? Because if one publisher is interested, it must mean that some other publisher would be interested as well. There could be an auction! A movie! A theme park! Woo-hoo! Pots of money!
Only there isn’t another publisher. Time passes. The heirs-and-assigns and their ignoramus lawyers lose track of the project. Nothing happens. The moment is gone.
It could be worse. One of the heirs could have literary ambitions, and conceive the idea of finishing Grandpa’s abandoned partial-plus-outline. They could offer publishers a joint package of their short stories plus Great-Aunt Eleanor’s stories, take it or leave it, which effectively means Great-Aunt Eleanor’s stories can’t be reprinted. They may refuse to allow republication because they can’t get their own work published, and their literary nose is out of joint.
Here’s a completely hypothetical case: ownership of a popular body of commercial fiction starring a very recognizable central character passes to some collateral branch of the author’s relatives. These people don’t know recto from verso. The estate’s executor is very knowledgeable, and is doing a good job. Unfortunately, some thuggish, ignorant local lawyers convince the heirs that the executor is doing them wrong, and get themselves made executors instead. They then proceed to mishandle the estate for their own profit and amusement. After years of bad behavior, they cap all their previous exploits by scuttling what would have been an extremely profitable pair of media projects based on the work. Why? Because part of their price for letting the property be used is that they themselves should be given high-level jobs in the projects, for which they’re completely unqualified. This doesn’t happen. Instead, the projects get rewritten to star two similar-but-not-copyrighted characters. One’s a great success, the other’s a huge success, and both would have done the literary property a world of good.
Mind, that’s hypothetical.
If that’s too complicated, imagine an author’s entire body of work being kept out of print because the rights passed to the ex-spouse’s third husband after the ex-spouse died, and he hated the author.
Even if the heirs-and-assigns aren’t pulling flagrantly stupid stunts, those extra decades of copyright are a drag on the publishability of the work. David Hartwell and I were both doing big retrospective story collections in the wake of the last big copyright extension. That change did something which I’d been told in my youth would never happen: works that had gone out of copyright went back in. David got caught with “The Machine Stops” already in print in his collection, and had to pay the E.M. Forster estate some undisclosed sum he still growls about. I was luckier. It took Bob Cloud of SMP Production two or three memos to convince me that “Danny Deever” was a problem, but I was finally made to realize that it really had gone back into copyright, and had to be pulled from Eileen Gunn’s introduction to “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment.”
Right about now would be a natural time for people to be compiling anthologies of the early 20th C. writers of fantasy, horror, and proto-SF. It’s not happening. Look at Dunsany. His marvellous and seminal fantasy short stories were published in collections from 1905 to 1919, but the man himself lived to 1957. And think of that moldering forest-floor mulch of writers who sold who knows how many stories in the course of their careers, only one or two of which a modern reader might still find striking. Just finding the stories would be a heroic but imaginable tasks. Securing the rights is beyond imagination. The heirs would range from intransigent to unfindable; and those you could find would have to have the entirety of standard publishing practices explained to them, after which they’d consult their cousin the real-estate lawyer, who would give them dreadful advice. Best not to even try. Too bad, but it’s best not to even try.
Electronic piracy is a fight that’s still being waged. Like extended copyrights, proposed draconian laws prohibiting electronic piracy and other copyright infringement are being hailed as a defense of the rights of the little guy. You know what? They aren’t. They’re being pushed because the big entertainment combines are all twitchy at the thought of their content escaping into the wild.
We known that the biggest reason people buy a specific work of fiction is that they’ve read and enjoyed another work by that same author. For years now, Jim Baen has been making electronic versions of his books available online in advance of their hardcopy publication. As far as anyone in the industry can tell, it does their sales no harm at all, and may well help. Cory Doctorow made his first novel available online at no charge. His hardcopy sales were just fine. Further afield, I’ve noticed that when Patrick has the opportunity to listen to lots of unlicensed copies of recordings, his record purchases go way up.
I don’t approve of hardcopy piracy of hardcopy publications, or online piracy of online content. That’s a different thing. But so far, when it comes to scattered feral electronic versions of hardcopy publications, the rule seems to be that familiarity breeds audience.
***
For some time now I’ve been meaning to recommend Cader Books’ pithy and accurate Book Publishing FAQ. Everyone should read it. For example:
Q. Do I need an agent to sell my book to a publisher?
A. Probably, but not necessarily.
(The real answers are longer than what I’m quoting. I’m just giving you the flavor of the thing.)
Q. How do I find the right agent or editor?
A. Smart research—the same way you do anything else in life.Q. Can you copyright a book idea, or a title?
A. No.Q. So how do I keep my idea from getting stolen?
Q. How do I find the right publisher for my book?
A. The best protection is to execute your idea as well as possible.
A. The same way that you find an editor or agent—by research.
They also explain what a standard book deal looks like, how to put together a good proposal, and the three self-explanatory things to never say in a nonfiction book proposal:
1. “Who knows, it could be the next pet rock.”
2. “All my friends think this is a great idea.”
3. “I know we can make a million dollars with this one.”
Wise advice.
***
Addendum:
I knew there was something more I wanted to say about books going out of print. Julian Bond shook it loose by asking the right question in the comment thread:
Falling out of print is a book’s natural fate. It may be now, but does it have to be? Do we have the technology now (eg print on demand) to make sure that a book is always available even when it’s initial print run has been remaindered. This is classic long tail thinking. Even if the number of purchasers drops to zero for a few years can we make sure that the next potential purchaser can still buy it?
I said, we’re talking about two different kinds of “out of print.” One is where you can’t buy a new copy of a book you already know you want. POD may be the answer there.
The other sort is where, if you don’t already know you want to read the book, nothing in your environment is going to suggest it to you. Reviews are a significant cue, but the biggest one is the cover of the book itself.
Every book cover is an advertisement—for itself, for other books like itself, for the whole idea of literature; but mostly for itself. If it ceases to be displayed in places where people look at book covers, that’s a different kind of out of print. There’s only so much display space: a sort of collective physical mindspace.
(Incidentally: the loss of wire racks? A significant change in our culture. The chattering classes haven’t noticed it because they all go to bookstores. Books are still selling very well, but we’ve lost a lot of that collective display space that was an ongoing advertisement for the joys of literacy.)
POD technology can provide a copy of a book that you want, but it’s simply not the same thing as that larger and far more complex technology whereby a book finds new readers. The latter involves a sort of collective consciousness that the book exists. Historically we’ve instantiated that consciousness in a lot of ways: reviews, reading lists, library shelves, shop windows, book clubs, wire rack and bookstore displays, etc. New instantiations are evolving on the net.
No one knows all there is to know about the physics and geography of book-mindspace. There’ve always been people who’ve been intensely knowledgeable and familiar with the current physical forms and patterns of book-mindspace. What we’ll make of it electronically will be interesting to see.
I’m confident of one thing: the number of books we can hold suspended in book-mindspace will be smaller than the number of books whose text is stored in POD databases, ready to be printed out.
Antony Lane of the New Yorker did an exercise - twice, I think - where he read the top ten bestselling books of a given year some decades before, and reported back. I don't think he felt there were any real undiscovered gems there, but I don't remember very well. Of course, that wasn't necessarily the point of the exercise (bestselling books being what they are), and it certainly doesn't detract from your point here.
The mention of Dunsany made me wonder where the example of H.P. Lovecraft would fit in here. It must have been close to fifty years after his death before his works began to bring in any money at all. Which is not to say that Arkham House did the best possible job with them (and I'm not sure where the money was going). But yeah, the Old Possum defence isn't especially useful in this debate.
Slightly unrelated (but, well, it feels related to me): didn't James Fenton get paid a vast amount to write lyrics to Les Miserables, which in the end were not used? He may even have got a percentage of the take. This annoys me, because *I* could have written unsatisfactory lyrics for that musical too. I just wasn't asked.
Here's another example of what can go wrong with copyright: In the 1960s, Alexander Grothendieck (whose influence on 20th century mathematics puts him in the same league of thinker as Einstein & Freud) and his coworkers wrote a series of books titled Seminaire de Geometrie Algebrique". These books are literally the most important books in algebraic geometry, and they have been out of print for years. Grothendieck has retired from human society, and his permission can not be obtained. It seems quite likely that these books will remain out of print until well into the next century. (Mathematicians, being practical sorts, have simply resorted to passing it around in a fashion which is not strictly legal.)
I don't approve of hardcopy piracy of hardcopy publications, or online piracy of online content. That's a different thing. But so far, when it comes to scattered feral electronic versions of hardcopy publications, the rule seems to be that familiarity breeds audience.
Yes. Hallelujah.
What I've been doing since my summer vacation: I've been buying short stories from authors, most of which were already published, and giving them away on a Creative Commons license that allows everyone else to give these particular audio readings of said stories away perpetually.
Buying things and giving them away sounds like a strange business model -- but in eight months we've made enough money doing it that we've been able to raise our payment rates, put two more people on paid staff, and we're finally forming a company for the thing. (We were going to do a 501(c)(3) initially, but it became clear that we could do less good that way.)
Meanwhile, we've had authors who keep contributing to us because they say their stories on Escape Pod get them more fan e-mail than the original print publications.
That's the new world. I love it. And as important as copyright is, I'm grateful that we have Creative Commons today as a balance for its excesses.
What Lane did was slightly different: he read and reviewed the NYT fiction bestsellers for the (then) current week (15 May 1994), repeating an experiment conducted by Gore Vidal a little over twenty years earlier, and then did the same for the list of 1 July 1945 on its fiftieth anniversary. In both cases some of the books are on the Cader annualized lists as well. Both pieces, as "Bestsellers I" and "Bestsellers II," are in the collection Nobody's Perfect, which, being solid Anthony Lane, you ought to read.
The '94 list is:
10. Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
9. Disclosure, Michael Crichton
8. Lovers, Judith Krantz
7. The Alienist, Caleb Carr
6. The Day After Tomorrow, Allan Folsom (a thriller, but not the source of the later disaster film)
5. Inca Gold, Clive Cussler
4. The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller
3. "K" is for Killer, Sue Grafton
2. Remember Me, Mary Higgins Clark
1. The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield
While the '45 books are:
10. Forever Amber, Kathleen Winsor
9. Earth and High Heaven, Gwethalyn Graham
8. Dragon Harvest, Upton Sinclair
7. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, as if I needed to tell you
6. The Wide House, Taylor Caldwell
5. The Ballad and the Source, Rosamund Lehmann
4. Immortal Wife, Irving Stone
3. Commodore Hornblower, C. S. Forester
2. Captain from Castile, Samuel Shellabarger
1. A Lion is In the Streets, Adria Locke Langley
Both lists contain a fair amount of Commercial Product, Books That Got Filmed, and Books That Just Went Poof. Lane finds more to like in the Nineties list, and from the half of each list I've read, I would agree with him.
And I will admit to being aware of Mary Roberts Rinehart, but that's mainly due to the movie adaptations of The Spiral Staircase (there are four) and The Bat two filmings, one silent). But then, is anybody still reading Forever Amber?
I'd heard of Mazo de la Roche (author of the Jalna series, right?), but then again, I'm very interested in authors which are forgotten today, but helped shape public opinion in their time. Like Toyohiko Kagawa, the japanese christian labour activist and nobel prize nominee, who was read much by christians in the west.
Alexandra Rachmanova has a wiki page in German. Her diaries from the russian revolution were read by amongst others Knut Hamsun. Can we understand his time without knowing what he read? Her earlier work is in fact out of copyright, but you can't find it in Gutenberg...
I have heard of Mary Roberts Rinehart; her book The Circular Staircase placed #40 on the Mystery Writers of America list of "the top 100 mystery novels of all time," and I might actually get around to reading it some time this year. I've also read Harold Bell Wright's first novel, Shepherd of the Hills.
(Yes, I did read the Wright novel for a class--a junior high class in Branson, Missouri, where an outdoor theater group performs it at dusk most nights (except Sunday) from early May to mid-October--really, they even have a website, which I was going to post here but the comment filter seems to have deemed it "questionable content." At least one classmate took part in these performances, and I think one of my teachers used to do so as well.)
Perhaps significantly, both of these novels date from before their respective authors dominated the bestseller lists. In other words, these are the books that made the authors famous (and are the basis for such fame as they enjoy today) rather than the bestsellers people bought in the hopes they'd be as good as the earlier books.
Thanks for giving me some more booklists to play with.
By the way, I will note that Frank Yerby was one of my favorite authors while I was in my teens, and I have heard of Mary Roberts Rinehart in passing.
And, yeah, books do come in, and go out of, style. And sometimes even books by the best known authors do. None of my contemporaries seems to have read Upton Sinclair's marvelous Lanny Budd series. And I fear that I am one of an increaingly shrinking number of people who actually know that Dumas continued his Musketeers saga until the day that D'Artagnan dies. (And, no, I will not say how. Spoilers stink.)
OTOH, I am running up against what you were talking about. Time recently published a list of "100 Top Novels from 1923 to the Present," and I have been working my way through that list. A lot of the books are mildly interesting, some are great and I an delighted to have now met them, and there are one or two -- Like Walker Percy's, The Moviegoer, which make me wonder how the list was compiled, and how that particular book won a National Book Award.
At any rate, thank you again for guiding me to the websites mentioned, since reading lists are one of my main forms of enjoyment.
I adore Booth Tarkington and am so glad to see him well represented here. I've also read Gene Stratton Porter as a child, and note there was one Frances Hodgson Burnett book on the list (anyone remember Little Lord Fauntleroy setting a fashion of long hair for boys at the end of the 19th century?).
I'm surprised by all the Winston Churchill books in the early 20th century. Must check that out. And then, Rafael Sabatini. I am told that anyone who is a fan of Dorothy Dunnett must read Sabatini.
Thank you for a wonderful treasure trove of book information. Off to the library for me!
I've got a collection of favorite dead authors on a personal website of mine. A large portion of it is probably legally fishy, but as present copyright law is totally broken, I'm just hoping it slips under the radar. Has so far. Haven't picked anyone with an active estate.
I'm wondering what publishers do with turn-of-the-century authors these days -- I mean, I know, f'rinstance, that there are a number of different editions on the market of The King In Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. I seem to recall hearing that he had one son who went insane and his house, abandoned, was squatted by a bunch of partiers in the sixties before burning down. So I'm not sure what would be up with his literary estate, but I doubt anyone was taking care of it . . . ? So how are they dealing?
Is there an abandonware clause? Now I'm all curious.
In other news, I heard from a friend today that all Blackberrys may be deactivated shortly, due to a line of code in their operating system which is similar to another line of code in others', leading to a lawsuit and a cease-and-desist order. These devices are used in a lot of really tetchy lines of business which won't take well to a Microsoft replacement with lower security.
"... The knowledge of books and publishing possessed by the aforementioned heirs of the ex-spouse's step-grandchildren by her third marriage usually boils down to, “No one would have thought Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats would be worth a lot, either.” They'll turn down a proposal to do a nice little reprint project (not a lot of money in it, but everyone involved read the books when they were kids, so they're fond of them) that would be just the thing to revive a little interest in your work. Why? Because if one publisher is interested, it must mean that some other publisher would be interested as well. There could be an auction! A movie! A theme park! Woo-hoo! Pots of money!..."I've been told that this scenario has happened with one of the NESFA Press projects
I had an interesting "rediscovered author" experience last year, picking up a book called McLevy, the Edinburgh Detective at the airport. It's one of a set of three books issued by the Mercat Press, based here in Embra. (The other two are McLevy Returns and The McGovan Casebook)
James McLevy turns out to have been a police detective - a real one - in 1850's Edinburgh. He wrote several books based on his notes from real crimes. Nearly thirty years later (1878), a violin teacher named William Crawford Honeyman published a series of similar accounts, allegedly by a detective named James McGovan. They were enormously popular, selling 25,000 copies and being translated into French and German.
And then they were forgotten. And now they are republished, and they're not bad at all.
According to the cover notes, Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical student in Edinburgh when the McGovan books were published One of them, notably, includes a long discussion of violins, particluarly Cremona violins. Reading these things, one wonders whether Holmes' Cremona is a tribute.
When I was a boy in the 70s the Western genre was still huge in Norway, with several long-running book series, a monthly magazine, etc. I remember that the magazine disappeared in the early 80s. One of the complaints of the editors, aside from lower sales, was that you couldn't get new short fiction and illustrations from the US anymore, and "imaginative recycling" and local talent could only go so far.
Concerning nurse novels, I remember those from the newspaper kiosks. Wonder if they became less popular when it became common for women to study to be a doctor, and not just marry them?
I've seen the claim that some genres disappear when the attitudes that gave birth to them mutated or disappeared. I've seen quite a lot of books for boys from my father's time that had a "Scandinavian goes to the Tropics, has adventures, teaches the natives how to get their act to gether" subtheme...
Per
I'd like to see copyright expire 5 years after first publication, plain and simple.
Incidentally, I'm one of the people behind What Should I Read Next?. You may be passingly interested to see the 20 most popular books on the site:
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: Adult Edition - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
The inevitable mixture of 'timeless classics' and recent hits, I guess.
Poor old Pooh. Disney has Mickey and Donald captive, but at least Disney created them. Pooh was sold into servitude. His masters are very cruel. Compare these extracts, in which Pooh is fetching a pot of honey as bait for a Heffalump trap:
When Pooh got home, he opened his cupboard. "This pot is far too heavy to carry," he said. So Pooh decided to remove some of the honey. And since he did not have anywhere to put the honey, he put it in his mouth. The honey pot was still heavy. So, as he walked along, Pooh ate some more. Then he ate some more again. And again. And again. As Pooh walked to meet piglet, the pot felt much lighter, but for some reason, his stomach felt heavier!
When Pooh arrived, Piglet had nearly finished digging the hole. "Did you bring the honey?" Piglet asked. "Yes," answered Pooh. Pooh handed the honey pot to Piglet and together they placed it in the hole. The trap was all set.
And now, in stereo:
As soon as he got home, he went to the larder; and he stood on a chair, and took down a very large jar of honey from the top shelf. It had HUNNY written on it, but, just to make sure, he took off the paper cover and looked at it, and it looked just like honey. "But you never can tell," said Pooh. "I remember my uncle saying once that he had seen cheese just this colour." So he put his tongue in, and took a large lick. "Yes", he said, "it is. No doubt about that. And honey, I should say, right down to the bottom of the jar. Unless, of course," he said, "somebody put cheese in at the bottom just for a joke. Perhaps I had better go a little further...just in case...in case Heffalumps don't like cheese...same as me... Ah!" And he gave a deep sigh. "I was right. It is honey, right the way down."
Having made certain of this, he took the jar back to Piglet, and Piglet looked up from the bottom of his Very Deep Pit, and said, "Got it?" and Pooh said, "Yes, but it isn't quite a full jar," and he threw it down to Piglet, and Piglet said, "No, it isn't! Is that all you've got left?" and Pooh said, "Yes," because it was. So Piglet put the jar at the bottom of the pit, and they went off home together.
Niall: I wasn't too keen on the rewrite of the extract, but it does sound like how Disney would handle a scene like that. -_-;
What worries me more is that Disney plan to do away with Christopher Robin in 2007, and replace him with a girl. To me, that would destroy the meaning of the original stories, and it'd cause confusion if kids went for the books looking for the girl and found Christopher Robin instead. ¬¬
(Some info on this here from USA Today: Disney lets Girl into Winnie's World)
Copyright is, truly, b0rked. I think part of the problem is that it's the wrong right to use to protect creator's interests in their work in the first place; and furthermore, the interests of media giants like Disney and folks like us™ aren't aligned. However the greater part of the problem is the international standardization process conducted in the name of "free trade".
International committees on Foo and Bar are set up (where Foo might, for example, be database publishing, and Bar might be general copyright). Committee meetings are held in far-flung corners of the globe while junior diplomats try to hammer out a consensus on how everyone should implement Foo and Bar in their respective legal codes. Only large organizations can lobby for their interests in this process, because the costs of traipsing around the planet are not small -- so the big industries are represented, but not the folks like us™. And the big lobbyists can use these committees to push their agenda through the international treaty process.
For example (in simplified form): BigCorp sends a lobbyist to sidle up to the EU functionary and says "you'd better adopt policy X, because the USA is adopting policy X". The EU functionary thinks about this, thinks about an imminent trade war, and decides to go with the flow. Lobbyists from BigCo can then overtly sidle up to the US delegation and say "the EU is adopting policy X". The US delegation thinks about an imminent trade war, and decides to go with the flow. When they later compare notes with the EU delegation, the conversation goes like: "we gather you're adopting policy X." "Yup." "Us too." "What a coincidence!" ... and policy X gets turned into an international treaty and ratified even though nobody at ground level actually likes or wants policy X.
And this is how we ended up with life +70 for copyright.
Personally, I'd like to see a compromise: life, plus unlimited ten year extensions. If someone's interested enough in my work after I die to fill out some forms once a decade, then they're interested enough to retain some claim on the work. If not, it ought to lapse into the public domain so other people can see it. Ten year extensions would be no problem for Disney. And they'd save us the problem presented by orphan works. (Eric Flint tells of his headache in chasing the rights to a short story by C. M. Kornbluth -- eventually he managed, on the fourth attempt, to get a partner in a big literary agency to actually open the fricking filing cabinet and confirm that they had, indeed, inherited Kornbluth's estate from another agent when they'd died -- nobody at the agency had actually heard of Kornbluth before Eric went digging, which is why his work's been so thin on the ground of late.)
Sure it's not perfect -- but I'm half-tempted to say that tearing up the whole body of copyright law and abolishing it would be an improvement over the current mess. At least we'd know where we stand, and we'd be able to read stuff that's currently locked away.
Two thoughts,
Falling out of print is a book's natural fate. It may be now, but does it have to be? Do we have the technology now (eg print on demand) to make sure that a book is always available even when it's initial print run has been remaindered. This is classic long tail thinking. Even if the number of purchasers drops to zero for a few years can we make sure that the next potential purchaser can still buy it?
Is there a parallel here with audio? Music gets deleted, moved to back catalogue, remaindered or whatever. There are thousads (perhaps millions) of albums that it is now simply impossible to buy. The masters probably still exist somewhere in music label libraries or recording studio cupboards. Is there a mechanism now to mke these available again? Perhaps CD production on demand, or digital storage for later digital download?
I thought I had read John Cleveland, but Fanny Hill turned out to have been written by John Cleland...
Charlie Stross,
Would a CC Founder's Copyright (http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/) help, or do you think that's too restrictive?
A. J. Luxton;
wrote: Is there an abandonware clause? Now I'm all curious.
No, more's the pity. "Fair Use" is said to be an "active defense", in other words, you can try to defend yourself with it in court after you've spend money on a lawyer, etc. Makes copyright rather dangerous to the poor and well intentioned.
In other news, I heard from a friend today that all Blackberrys may be deactivated shortly, due to a line of code in their operating system which is similar to another line of code in others', leading to a lawsuit and a cease-and-desist order.
I haven't seen primary sources on this, but apparently* it is an actual case of "inventor gets his ideas stolen, dies in poverty, of heartbreak/old age before getting his due". His old partners formed a company to keep litigating the Blackberry company out of a sense of justice. (Or greed?) Because of stupid, cruel, theft of ideas exactly like that we have some of the odd intellectual property laws we do.
Mind you, this is patent law in the Blackberry case, not copyright law. Different rules, tangential to the discussion, wot wot.
-r.
*I fully expect someone to correct me on the details of this, in other words.
BTW, Teresa, you have a coding error in the wikipedia link to "List of years in literature" -- it's missing the "=" after the href, which is making the essay show up garbled in the livejournal RSS feed.
On the topic, you all might also find interesting this essay from the Yale Law Review:
Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It -- PDF file
Julian Bond: "Falling out of print is a book's natural fate. It may be now, but does it have to be? Do we have the technology now (eg print on demand) to make sure that a book is always available even when it's initial print run has been remaindered. This is classic long tail thinking. Even if the number of purchasers drops to zero for a few years can we make sure that the next potential purchaser can still buy it?"
We're talking about two different kinds of "out of print." One is where you can't buy a new copy of a book you already know you want. POD may be the answer there.
The other sort is where, if you don't already know you want to read the book, nothing in your environment is going to suggest it to you. Reviews are a significant cue, but the biggest one is the cover of the book itself.
Every book cover is an advertisement -- for itself, for other books like itself, for the whole idea of literature; but mostly for itself. If it ceases to be displayed in places where people look at book covers, that's a different kind of out of print. There's only so much display space: a sort of collective physical mindspace.
(Incidentally: the loss of wire racks? A significant change in our culture. The chattering classes haven't noticed it because they all go to bookstores. Books are still selling very well, but we've lost a lot of that collective display space that was an ongoing advertisement for the joys of literacy.)
POD technology can provide a copy of a book that you want, but it's simply not the same thing as that larger and far more complex technology whereby a book finds new readers. The latter involves a sort of collective consciousness that the book exists. Historically we've instantiated that consciousness in a lot of ways: reviews, reading lists, library shelves, shop windows, book clubs, wire rack and bookstore displays, etc. New instantiations are evolving on the net.
No one knows all there is to know about the physics and geography of book-mindspace. There've always been people who've been intensely knowledgeable and familiar with the current physical forms and patterns of book-mindspace. What we'll make of it electronically will be interesting to see.
I'm confident of one thing: the number of books we can hold suspended in book-mindspace will be smaller than the number of books whose text is stored in POD databases, ready to be printed out.
I remember my first encounter with the problem of out of print. I was pretty young, and I was starting to realize how much I liked certain author's work. I was on a Barbara Hambly kick, so when I learned that her first novel was a historical mystery set in Ancient Rome (!) I was terribly excited. God Bless that mall-bookstore* clerk who patiently explained to me that even recently published books get listed as "out of print" really quickly, and once the print run's done, that's pretty much it.
I eventually found it a few years later when it was reprinted, ironically through one of those mall-bookstore's back orders.
Oh, right. The title is Search the Seven Hills, originally The Quirinal Hill Affair, which kind of suggest the countours of mystery publishing over time in and of itself. Note that Hambly originally wanted to call it The Baby Eaters, but for some reason the publisher talked her out of it. :) Apparently its still pretty popular; used on Amazon, it goes for between 21$ and 65$, which is awesome for something that originally sold for 3.95$
I've got a whole fistful of favorite authors/titles that have slipped out of print. Mercifully, some have wiggled their way back. P.C. Hodgell's God Stalk for instance, has slipped away, but one of the sequels has been printed up by Meisha Merlin. Susan Dexter (The Ring of Allaire and Elizabeth Boyer (The Wizard and the Warlord) also have pretty much vanished from sight; Google hasn't turned up very much on either for quite a while. Books going out of print is unnerving to fans as much as authors, I think. "Gee, I didn't realize I liked something so obscure. Is there something wrong with me?"
-r.
*for middleschoolers living in the suburbs, nifty used bookstores, or any bookstores that didn't begin with "walden" or "j dalton" didn't exist, except for summer vacation trips out west.
otherdeb writes: "I fear that I am one of an increasingly shrinking number of people who actually know that Dumas continued his Musketeers saga until the day that D'Artagnan dies."
From a discussion held a couple of months ago on Our Hosts's site about Milady's lousy treatment, I'd say there are quite a few of us who have actually read Dumas as opposed to being familiar with the movie adaptations.
Speaking of those, how many people actually still read H.G.Wells? His early stuff is good. Heck, just go back to the intro to War of the Worlds:
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
I think Charlie's "life plus infinite ten year extensions if you bother to apply for them" would actually solve all the problems, including Disney's.
I was told by a UK lawyer that is doesn't appear to be possible to put your work into public domain on death, or anyway, in your will. I don't know if this is true, but it's what I was told.
On your specific examples, I thought The Robe was a classic for the ages, suitable for giving everyone who gets confirmed. How I cried over it when I was eleven! I'm surprised it isn't in print. (What do they sell in "Christian Bookshops"? If it isn't The Robe, they're not doing their job.) I thought Jalna sucked though, and Yerby too.
However, sometimes they do come back. Alfred Duggan (step-son of Lord Curzon, C.20 writer of Roman and Medieval historical fiction, best novel IMO Three's Company, about Lepidus) who I have sought for years second hand in ratty old editions, has been brought back into print in glorious attractive paperback. Josephine Tey is back in print, in Britain anyway. And a lot of Dunsany that's been impossible to find has been reprinted in the last five years -- in Gollantz Fantasy Masterworks and in gorgeous US small press editions. Dunsany's heirs are probably easier to find than most people's, him being a lord.
When I were a lad, back in the days when the 20th century still had years to run, library shelves were loaded down with the works of writers like Mazo de la Roche, Frank G. Slaughter, Lloyd C. Douglas, and A.J. Cronin. I managed to avoid reading most of them (having developed an addiction to SF&F early on, and being more interested in non-fiction when I wasn't reading SF&F -- and poetry and Anglo-Caribbean writing I'm compelled to add in honesty). The reason: I was put off either by the covers, or the subject matter (though this did not prevent me from reading the novels of Frank Yerby).
for middleschoolers living in the suburbs, nifty used bookstores, or any bookstores that didn't begin with "walden" or "j dalton" didn't exist, except for summer vacation trips out west.That was my experience growing up in the 80s in the relatively well-off Philadelphia suburbs too. However, now when I go back to visit my parents not only has a "Paperback Trader"-type store opened up within the closest thing you get to walking distance in that part of suburbia (i.e. a 5-10 minute car ride), but there are also two relatively good thrift/donation-driven stores, both of which sell books. (And one of which provided me with Terry Pratchet's "The Fifth Elephant")
The small bookstore with a knowledgeable proprietor may be banished from the suburbs, but apparently the mall bookstores are no longer your only choice. (Oh, and yes, there are the obligatory big huge box book stores at about the same distance away as the mall)
Now if only one of the various revitalization plans for Burlington would include a bookstore... we can apparently have 3 different beauty supply shops on the easily walkable downtown main drag, but nothing that even looks faintly like a bookstore.
One other copyright issue that's come up recently is translations.
Apparently, the original English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was extremely poorly done, not only introducing errors but cutting about 150 pages. Qualified translators would love a crack at making a more-accurate more-complete English version. But the publisher refuses to pay for an updated translation and refuses to allow anybody else to publish one, either. [link, examples and online petition]
So even when you know the book exists, you may not be getting what the author intended...
out of print doesnt mean out of use--i see lots of those that are used not only by academics, but in personal histories as well (the cookbooks of course, but some of the jesus books from the 20s have been passed down in my family for years)
I'm surprised by all the Winston Churchill books in the early 20th century.I haven't looked at the lists myself, but I think you will find those are by Winston Churchill, the American author, rather than the one you are thinking of (who certainly wrote books, but not ones likely to figure on those lists).
What the...? Do you realize that there is very little of Hammett's fiction in print?
Confused by the 'wire racks' reference - anyone?
Well, with wire racks, the only way that a book could be displayed was with the cover facing outward, ajay. In today's bookstores, all you see are book spines, not exactly the best way to have you notice the book. Of course, some novels are so darn thick that they can display a miniature version of the cover. Still, spines don't do it for me.
In case anyone would like to follow the broken link:
(If you want to get a little more perspective on a given year, go to Wikipedia's List of years in literature, though Wikipedia's list of significant books for that year won't match the bestseller list...
It isn't, unless by “little guy” you mean the heirs of the author's ex-spouse's step-grandchildren by her third marriage.
And this is precisely what's happened to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. The current beneficiary of the Estate (as far as anyone on the LordPeter list has been able to determine) is Sayers's son's half-sister or her children/grandchildren. The rub here is that this half-sister knew about Anthony Fleming (Sayers's son) for years but never did anything about the connection until after his death. Sayers was very clear about not wanting any more Lord Peter books written, the fact that Thrones, Dominations was finished and a second novel was written goes directly counter to her wishes as the creator.
[rant about the sheer awfulness of the Paton-Walsh continuations redacted]
[i]apparently the mall bookstores are no longer your only choice. [/i]
There's a mall without a bookstore by me [to be fair, it's a VERY upscale mall where they leave Bentleys around in the corridors. I don't care about fairness, I care about books. ] Over the last 10 years, it was a mall with a bookstore, then a mall without, then with, then without. . .
I boycott it when it doesn't have a bookstore in. I suspect they don't notice.
I was wondering about this very question [copyright, not Bentleys or whatnot] and thinking about putting it into an Open Thread. Thanks for mentioning it!
Let's try that link again: Wikipedia's List of years in literature
The remark about the lamented wire racks ties in to a question which occurred to me the other day. One of the great values of used book stores is serendipity. While I, like probably most of the people reading this, shop for a lot of books online, and I have loved the monumental agoric efficiency of the net (or "the web"), I wonder if there is a calculation in conventional economics to value what we're losing by not being able to have happy accidents shopping ABE or Bookfinder.
As to Julian Bond's plaint, "Falling out of print is a book's natural fate. It may be now, but does it have to be?" The answer is yes.
Simply compare the rate of growth of the total-of-everything-published to the rate of growth of the human lifespan . . .
I have been insisting that one of the real differences for potential neo-fans today versus a generaion or two ago is that the canon is exponentially larger (and out of print, closing the rhetorical circle).
Copyright is the theme of Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants", perhaps the only short story he has written that actually is a decent homage to Robert A. Heinlein. The tone and pacing of the story are perfect, and the logic behind it is -- very Heinleinesque. Recommended as an argument for going back to the 37 years' copyright term.
"Forever Amber" has checked out 65 times at my library since we bought the edition in 1993. Not bad considering someone would probably have to actually look for this book and not merely pick it up because it was ever on the new book shelf or on the bestseller list.
Hmm, Yerby was one of my favorite library finds as a teen. (I love historical fiction.) There was even a country and western song that seems to have sprung from one of his books. ("I may have been born just plain white trash, but Fancy was my name...")
I've read _Forever Amber_, years and years ago. Can't say I remember much of the plot.
Found De la Roche when I was on a Galsworthy kick. That you can blame on Masterpiece Theater.
Read reams of Michener too.
rhandir: so far as I know, God Stalk is in print as half of Dark Of The Gods (from Meisha Merlin, as you say). One of my most-cherished memories from Interaction was P.C. Hodgell reading a chapter from the upcoming "Jame goes to the citadel" book, and one of the most bitter ones is that I missed the impromptu kaffee klatsch thrown together with her and some of my friends who'd also attended the reading.
rhandir, Meisha Merlin has all of P. C. Hodgell's books in print, and claims a new title is coming this year.
BY P. C. HODGELL:
Dark of the Gods, 2000
Includes God Stalk, “Bones” (short story), Dark of the Moon
Seeker’s Mask, 2001
Blood and Ivory: A Tapestry, 2002
To Ride a Rathorn (working title), coming 2006
It'll all be the same in a couple of thousand years.
"Out of a very large output by the three tragic poets [Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles], only a small fraction remains. Other authors, sufficiently valued in their day to have defeated these masters in dramatic contests, are now known only by name, their entire body of work having disappeared."
– Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo, author's note
A mouse can chew up your old books -- in more ways than one
If you just want to read the book, the used market on the internet will meet > 99% of your needs. Using bookfinder.com I researched the 1945 bestseller list. You can buy decent condition reading copies of each book in the list for a total of 15.00 + postage and handling (the P+h will probably cost you more than the books). Of course nonfiction would be more expensive and maybe harder to find but the results will astonish anyone who is accustomed to relying on brick and mortar stores alone. There is a little noise that suggests the corporations may be thinking about targeting the online used book market but so far it is only noise.
Those were bestsellers- by definition, they're the things most likely to be in the used book stores.
I'm not saying your logic is wrong, but that it is unsupported.
Woo hoo!
cd,
Thanks for the tip on God Stalk. I thought I remembered that, but I wasn't sure if I had gotten that mixed up with the book club omnibus of Hambly's Dark Tower / Silicon Mage Nifty that you got to hear Hodgell talk. I came across (link sadly lost) a video clip of her on a local access cable channel (or something like that) talking about her upcoming book (which was Seeker's Mask at the time.)
Scott Raun,
Hah! Thanks for the tip. Hodgell publishes rather infrequently, so I hadn't bothered to look. I think that may be yet another "visibility to the reader" things that is going to be increasingly important; the ability to track your authors without having to read press releases, (or their bastardized decendants, bookstore ads), obsessivel check fan sites (that may suddenly stop updating), or sifting Usenet.
This is quite the tagnent, but if there was a way to monitor all my favorite author's output via say, an RSS feed... I think that is a place where disintermediation could really come in handy. Clearly the tech is there (if you haven't tried google's personalized homepage, then do so; you can take your rss feeds with you everywhere you can get a net connection) but the execution is lacking. I mean, really, trying to figure out how to find all of my favorite author's books on Amazon with the default search is quite frustrating.* Less so than when the only way I knew was to find the most recent thing they had published, and check the list at the front of the book (and hope they had only one publisher in their lifetime.) I remember how delighted I was to find a hardbound bibliography of Tolkein's stuff in a university. A bibliography. How pre-internet can you get? But invaluable for figuring out that I hadn't actually found all of his short stories.
Sorry. Rambling.
Hem. Thanks folks.
-r.
*Yes, I know I should be using better tools. Bowker's database or something. Tips? Anyone?
But then, is anybody still reading Forever Amber?
Apparently some folks are.
Our library is part of a consortium of 17 counties in northern West Virginia. I just looked it up (in "staff mode" I can look to see circulation counts). There are nine copies of the book and 2 of the video of the movie in the system. Two copies of the book have circulated (once each, from two different libraries) and the video has been out twice (again, once each from the two libraries that have it, one of which also had one of the books that went out. I can't see if it was the same patron, though).
Note that we only went online with this new system about seven months ago, in June, 2005; any figures before then are not retrievable (different software vendors, noncompatible programs). So these are *recent* figures.
I read the book a few years ago, after having seen the movie several times on TV. I liked the movie better, though that may be because of the leading men. (Richard Greene, drool, drool! And George Saunders was excellent as Charles II.)
Counter-example on copyright: J.M. Barrie died in 1937. His will assigned the copyright of Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and the royalties have supported the hospital for nearly 70 years. I think that is a Good Thing.
What's more, although Peter Pan itself is out of copyright next year, Great Ormond Street retains the rights to the characters (partly by commissioning a sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean, to be published this year), thus keeping them out of the grasp of Disney. I think that is also a Good Thing.
Another reason to extend copyright is to reduce competition. Copyright books can be stored away in "copyright prison" where they wont cannabalize new book sales. PD books can have unlimited numbers of publishers competing for a limited marketplace of book buyers. The fewer old books for sale, the more new books will sell.
"Forever Amber" has checked out 65 times at my library since we bought the edition in 1993.
FWIW, I read Forever Amber (from a library) for the first time a few years ago. When the author died, the book got a fair bit of publicity as a former bestseller, once-scandalous, with comparisons to GWTW.
I got curious and decided to check it out.
Three comments:
First, I looked at the lists for the 1910s and I was actually surprised how many of the authors' names I recognized. I've read only one listed book (The Montessori Method--still in print; I own a copy), but I've read other works by Gene Stratton Porter, H. G. Wells, and Kipling, for example.
Second, I too think copyright extension has gotten entirely out of hand. If not for Sonny Bono's work, early Gershwin would now be in the public domain and nonprofit orchestras could be having a field day. Great Ormond Street Hospital is a great counterexample, but perhaps J.K. Rowling could donate the rights to her next snippet (a la "Quidditch Through the Ages") to them. That could keep them going for a while.
Third, I really hope publishers will offer up their backlists for POD. There are a good many out-of-print books that I love to recommend to people, but I feel guilty recommending them because they're so hard to find (three examples: Ruth Stout's How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, B.J. Chute's Greenwillow, and Charlotte Armstrong's A Dram of Poison, which would make a terrific short film).
The problem is we have competing demands here. The big guys want to protect a few things and the result is that everything gets protected for a huge period of time. Do the big guys actually care about all that other stuff? No--it's just a few things they are trying to protect. It seems to me that there's a solution that's fair for everyone:
Copyright shouldn't be based on time at all. Rather, it should be treated like trademarks--it lasts only as long as it's used. When something goes off the market for too long and isn't superceeded (you don't need to keep offering the first edition, offering the 20th edition still protects the first edition) the copyright lapses.
I read your post with mixed feelings. Your commentary on copyright seemed to be spot on. However, your comments on books "falling out of print naturally" seemed forced and unconvincing. First, at the used bookstore where I work, we sell copies of "Forever Amber" at least once a week. Mary Roberts Rinehart, Frank Yerby, Mazo de la Roche, et. al., all have prominent places on our shelves. We haven't forgotten these authors, nor have our reading customers. Every year at least 60,000 books go out of print to make way for new books on a publishers front list. Of course, the new book business is always about "what's hot right now". Many of these books are badly written copies of bestselling books in a particular genre and probably deserve to be forgotten. But many older titles end up in used bookstores like ours (remember used bookstores?_ I'm always discussing and recommending older books to people. I sold a copy of Orie Hitt's "Pushover" only yesterday. I've read the book and I'll bet you the customer will be back for another book by this lurid pulp master. Nah, lots of the books you mention in your list are still being read and talked about. And as long as I am working in a bookstore, I'll pick up that "gasping author" on the beach, put him in my pocket and bring him back to the store to read myself and then pass it on to another. Not all of us have such short memories as you seem to suggest.
Your discussion of the inevitability of books going out of print, reminds me of the exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology about the 19th century philosopher's theories about memory based on his recollection of Victoria Falls. (Because it's MJT, I don't know that any of it is "real," but it's meaningful.)
This philosopher wrote that memory is an unnatural state; that amnesia is the state of nature. Memory is always transitory and cannot persist.
Thanks. Now, if anyone asks why I support Google Books, I can simply point them here. (And yes, I also support the right of authors or their heirs to opt out. Publishing houses, not so much. Especially on books out of print.)
I grew up in London, Ontario, where, for some bizarre reason, an entire subdivision was given Mazo de la Roche-themed names. It was called White Oaks, and the main street was Jalna Boulevard. I still can't see de la Roche titles like Variable Winds at Jalna in libraries or charity shops without picturing bland suburban streets at the edge of nowhere. Doubtless Extremely Inaccurate.
If not for that, though, I'd probably never have heard of her. Nor of Warwick Deeping, if Michael Moorcock hadn't unloaded on him in Wizardry and Wild Romance.
rhandir asked about an RSS feed for favorite authors. You might check out your local library -- some library catalog systems are now capable of giving you an rss feed of new items added within certain categories -- I know mine does a new databases feed and a feed by broad LC number, but the capability is there for narrower feeds.
Way uptread A.J. Luxton asked about "abandonware." Canada is ahead of us on this, and when our copyright office was asking for comments I suggested we look at their "unlocatable copyright owner" license. If you make a good faith effort and cannot find the copyright owner, you can apply for a license that will let you use the work for five years. See http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/unlocatable/index-e.html.
The thing about wire racks isn't just about the face-out presentation - it's also about distribution.
A free-standing wire rack would show up in a store in a town that could not by any stretch support a real bookstore. A distributor would come around once a month and top it off.
I grew up in a blue-collar suburb, four miles from the (comically inadequate...) downtown officesupply-slash-bookstore. But my town DID have a wire rack in the drugstore (and in the grocery stores, come to think of it).
And I can recall my ten-year-old self riding my bike over to the drugstore and finding a PKD Ace Double waiting for me. (Just sitting there, as quiet as a hand grenade.) It changed my life.
That's a part of the book experience that's now gone.
(P.S. I've actually read some Cleveland, back when I was doing the Metaphysicals. So there.)
I rejoice that the wire racks are still in the drugstores and grocery stores of Nashville. In fact, in the stores Kroger is remodeling and updating here, the magazine/book sections are larger--perhaps because Publix has such large ones.
All hail the wire racks!!!!!!!
Also, used book stores/Friends of the Library book sales/and miscelleaneous retail establishments with second-hand paperback sections. Bless them all.
Benet: "London, Ontario [...] an entire subdivision was given Mazo de la Roche-themed names. It was called White Oaks, and the main street was Jalna Boulevard. I still can't see de la Roche titles like Variable Winds at Jalna in libraries or charity shops without picturing bland suburban streets at the edge of nowhere. Doubtless Extremely Inaccurate."
Not inaccurate any more; I remember reading that Jalna has now been absorbed by the suburban fringes of the GTA. Indeed, Wikipedia confirms that it's in a Mississauga suburb.
Margaret S. writes:
Not inaccurate any more; I remember reading that Jalna has now been absorbed by the suburban fringes of the GTA. Indeed, Wikipedia confirms that it's in a Mississauga suburb.
GTA = Grand Theft Auto?
Huh!
Wire racks are what got me started on Star Trek. Bored out of my mind while mom was waiting for something at the drugstore, I picked up Tears of the Singers* a middling quality Trek novel. I had always worried that Trek was too geeky for me. I ceased remembering to worry pretty fast.
-r.
*I originally misspelled that as "Teas of the Singers" which would probably be something by Douglas Adams or G.K. Chesterton.
To slide across to a different medium . . .
I am a moderate level film nut (TCM and DVD's will keep me going for a while, like methadone, but sometimes I have to duck into a big city to find a decent art house) and it has been interesting to infuriating to see what has and has not made it to VCR/DVD. Prior to roughly 1950 it is no problem. Most movies were owned outright by the studios and the main problem is finding a decent copy that to restore and transfer. (Of course, if it is B+W pre 1951, there may be other risks. Check your local fire code.) The primary source is either the residual libraries from the studios themselves, or film archives like UCLA's. After roughly 1980, all production and performance contracts explicitly dealt with TV, video tape/disk, and other elecronic means of distribution. But in between is where the problems show up.
There have been films that people really would like to buy, that went for many years before becoing available because of rights problems. (Hitchcock's so-called "lost" films and The Manchurian Candidate are special cases of this). In a some cases, the residual rights were split among a variety of people, who could not get along with each other, or may have died since the film was released. In some cases it has been difficult to figure out just who can grant rights at all.
Janet Croft, A.J. Luxton;
What about the idea of "royalties escrow"? Has anyone tried that? Something to go with the "unlocatable owner" concept? You get to license to use the abandonware, and pay a certain %, equivalent to the going rate* into an escrow account. If the copyright owner gets ahold of you, they can get the $ in escrow, otherwise it is held until the copyright would naturally expire, when it is given to, say, a charitable oranization. (Retirement fund for destitute authors?)
There's a definite downside for the copyright holder if the republished work turns into another Harry Potter, offset by the value of cash in hand, and the knowlege that the license expires within 5 years. Besides, if the work becomes truly popular, and needs a second printing, then its time to renegotiate. In any case it could inspire the intransigent to claim "free money", while limiting publisher liability.
I can see lots of ways such a system could be gamed, but I think it might work.
Any comments from people familiar with non-U.S. copyright regimes?
-r.
*that would be me concealing the hard part, kind of equivalent to saying "We'll just go up these beaches here, and bam! in two weeks we'll be in Berlin!" in 1942
p.s. thanks for the tip on RSS feeds from library catalogs. On a slightly related note, I've considered seeing if an open-source OPAC type catalog might be a good way to keep track of my stuff, and who I loan/give it to. If I can find one that works and has RSS, well, I'll...right...insert something funny here, I can't find the penny-arcade reference.
Booklad: You're conflating Out of Print with "never available" in criticising Teresa's commentary.
It's entirely true that some books are surprisingly easy to find in used resources, online, thrift shops with a few bookshelves, and those wonderful havens called used bookstores. (Considering that Teresa insisted on recommending me at least one significantly out of print book at VP, I'm pretty sure she's aware of this.)
Out of print doesn't necessarily mean unread. However, it does mean, "No new supply. No advertising. Extremely low audience, growing at a rate that is significantly lower (With only a few exceptions) than replacement levels. And if it should happen that the last used copy is sold to someone who will never ever trade it in, that's it."
Which is a bit of a mouthful, thus "out of print". Fortunately, the last part (Selling the last copy, putting it out of commission forever) is unlikely. Even should all the books currently available be in the hands of people who won't sell them themselves -- People pass away, sometimes their estates sell the books rather than keep them. Unlikely things are found in attics or other storage spaces. But if the demand is too great meantime, the price escalates.
The wire rack may be dead, but the equivalent still exists - bookshelves in grocery stores, most of which have the book's covers facing the buyer. The bulk of said books are ones I'd never consider buying, but that was true of the wire rack books, too.
My favorite out of print impossible to find authors are Nicholas Stuart Grey and Sally Watson. You can go seriously broke tracking their books down. If I had known as a young person that libraries actually deaccession books... *sigh*
I've read several books recently that are out-of-print. It turns out they are easy to find at libraries, used bookstores, and online booksellers. These books don't seem particularly inaccessible to me. I don't see why we need new copies of currently out-of-print books if the material is still available. Just because there aren't 20 copies at your corner Borders store doesn't mean there's a problem.
Here's something to consider:
There are likely hundreds of thousands of book titles to choose from covering thousands of years of recorded history and hundreds of countries.
Assume that one will live up to 70 and will read for only around 50 years. Given full-time work, one can only read around a book every two weeks, or 1,200 books during those 50 years. That's not even 1 percent of a million. And the same can probably apply to films, music, and other works of art.
FYI, Forever Amber is still in print, and available from Ingram...
There are OOP reference books I'd like to get hold of. I bought a non-fiction OOP book last year, on line, that had been de-accessioned from a university library, after waiting two years for the planned reprint that never happened. Yeah, I could have gotten a printed-from-microfilm maybe-legible copy, for about three times what the publisher was planning to charge for it. I'm glad I found the real thing on-line (and the author was still around and had a web-page, so I wrote and told him how much I liked it.
Anybody knows where one can find the short fiction of Hammett? Yes, there is a hardcover out there titled Lost Stories, but I'm not sure if they're really worth reading if they were lost. I went to Powell Bookstore's web site hoping to find an old collection of his acknowledged-by-all-as-the-top stuff, but no such luck.
Larry Lessig and the EFF designed the Eric Eldred Act, in which copyright lasts for 50 years and is then maintained by a tiny annual tax paid at least once every 3 years. Valenti et al. killed it last time, but USAians can keep the idea alive.
GTA = "greater Toronto area".
Mazo de la Roche (originally, I understand, "Mazy Roach") is buried in the same graveyard as Stephen Leacock, about an hour's drive north of Toronto.
Her books seem to cycle in and out of print. I can't say as much for Winston Churchill. (N.B. although the American novelist is the one on the earlier bestseller lists, WSC's History of the Second World War was also on the bestseller lists for a very long time.)
I went over the 1940's and 1950's lists a while back (i.e. from before I was born; the 1960's and later correspond to periods in which I would have had some awareness of the books as new or reasonably recent). What struck me was how many books were ones that I knew but had not read -- that is, they were physically familiar to me from having sat on my parents' and grandparents' bookshelves, frequently in book club editions, but many to most of them were unread by me.
James Branch Cabell played a game with the popular authors of his day in books like Beyond Life and Straws and Prayer-Books, by having John Charteris refer casually to them but then footnoting them as if they were already in well-deserved oblivion. Thus:
"[I]t were folly to pretend that to us [Shakespeare and Milton were] as generally an intellectual influence, as Mr. Harold Bell Wright or Mrs. Gene Stratton Poter*. Of course, a century hence, there will still be a few readers for Hamlet, whereas Freckles -- which is regarded, I believe, as Mrs. Poter's masterpiece -- will conceivably be out of print.
* Charteris here refers to two very popular novelists of his day. "It is his almost clairvoyant power of reading the human soul which has made Mr. Wright's books among the most remarkable works of the present age." -- Oregon Journal, Portland. "It is difficult to speak of the work of Gene Stratton Porter and not to call upon all the superlatives of praise in the language." -- San Francisco Call."
I note, by the way, that Freckles is still in print, along with Girl of the Limberlost, and various books by Harold Bell Wright. Of course, we aren't a full century out yet, either.
Out of print is also not particularly helped by small press editions, because they are not things one normally "comes across". Thus, for example, various works by Cabell is still in print, but stumbling across his work in browsing anything but a second-hand bookstore is unlikely.
Paeng: One can only read one book every two weeks? I went through the entirety of Gabaldon's "Outlander" series in about a week and a half, and that's (currently) six books, the shortest of which is about 400 pages. I know I'm a freak of nature for my reading speed, but I'm not that much of a freak. And I do work full time.
I think that "a book every two weeks" is vastly underestimating how fast people can read.
Serge, try the Vintage Crime / Black Lizard crime fiction imprint. Here's their list of Hammett titles.
I think that "a book every two weeks" is vastly underestimating how fast people can read.
Vehement agreement here. If you're a fast reader for whom books are like oxygen (i.e., can't stand to be totally without one, ever) it's not too hard to finish a book in a couple of days, depending on its complexity.
"There have been films that people really would like to buy, that went for many years before becoing available because of rights problems. (Hitchcock's so-called "lost" films and The Manchurian Candidate are special cases of this). . ."
Is that what happened to The Hot Rock? I remember it very fondly, from a 20-year distance. . .
it's not too hard to finish a book in a couple of days, depending on its complexity
Ah, you slow readers. I'm reading novels at about a page a minute. I read it two or three times in the first week, then set it aside for a while to percolate through the backroads of my mind. After that - probably every year or two. (Comes with visual memory: not eidetic, just really persistent.)
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