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.

Posted January 27, 2006 2:09 AM by candle

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.)

Posted January 27, 2006 3:09 AM by A.J.

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:19 AM by Steve Eley

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?

Posted January 27, 2006 3:28 AM by John M. Ford

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...

Posted January 27, 2006 3:32 AM by Harald Korneliussen

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:32 AM by Rob T.

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 4:02 AM by otherdeb

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!

Posted January 27, 2006 4:03 AM by hrc

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 4:08 AM by A. J. Luxton

"... 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!..."

Posted January 27, 2006 4:20 AM by Craig McDonough

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 4:34 AM by abi

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

Posted January 27, 2006 4:36 AM by Per C. Jorgensen

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 5:36 AM by Andrew Chapman

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 5:46 AM by Niall McAuley

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)

Posted January 27, 2006 6:11 AM by Jennifer

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 6:13 AM by Charlie Stross

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?

Posted January 27, 2006 6:25 AM by Julian Bond

I thought I had read John Cleveland, but Fanny Hill turned out to have been written by John Cleland...

Posted January 27, 2006 6:52 AM by Martin Wisse

Charlie Stross,

Would a CC Founder's Copyright (http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/) help, or do you think that's too restrictive?

Posted January 27, 2006 6:59 AM by chris

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 7:38 AM by rhandir

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

Posted January 27, 2006 7:49 AM by Naomi Novik

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 8:07 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 8:11 AM by rhandir

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."

Posted January 27, 2006 8:24 AM by Serge

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 8:26 AM by Jo Walton

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).

Posted January 27, 2006 8:30 AM by Fragano Ledgister

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.

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 8:44 AM by Daniel Martin

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...

Posted January 27, 2006 9:09 AM by Lis Riba

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)

Posted January 27, 2006 9:19 AM by Anthony Easton

I'm surprised by all the Winston Churchill books in the early 20th century.

Posted January 27, 2006 9:21 AM by Dan Blum

What the...? Do you realize that there is very little of Hammett's fiction in print?

Posted January 27, 2006 9:28 AM by Serge

Confused by the 'wire racks' reference - anyone?

Posted January 27, 2006 9:30 AM by ajay

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 9:39 AM by Serge

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...

Posted January 27, 2006 9:40 AM by Casey

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]

Posted January 27, 2006 9:58 AM by Natalie

[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!

Posted January 27, 2006 10:04 AM by Sandy B.

Let's try that link again: Wikipedia's List of years in literature

Posted January 27, 2006 10:06 AM by Daniel Martin

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).

Posted January 27, 2006 10:20 AM by Neil Rest

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 10:25 AM by Scorpio

"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.

Posted January 27, 2006 10:45 AM by Sredni Vashtar

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 10:46 AM by Lori Coulson

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 10:49 AM by cd

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

Posted January 27, 2006 10:51 AM by Scott Raun

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

Posted January 27, 2006 10:52 AM by John Stanning

A mouse can chew up your old books -- in more ways than one

Posted January 27, 2006 10:59 AM by Erik Nelson

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 11:06 AM by George

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 11:19 AM by Sandy B.

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?

Posted January 27, 2006 11:19 AM by rhandir

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.)

Posted January 27, 2006 11:29 AM by Lois Fundis

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 11:30 AM by John Stanning

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 11:31 AM by Stephen Balbach

"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.

Posted January 27, 2006 11:40 AM by Lis Riba

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).

Posted January 27, 2006 11:51 AM by Lila

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 12:22 PM by Loren Pechtel

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 12:27 PM by Booklad

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 12:28 PM by Glenn Fleishman

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.)

Posted January 27, 2006 12:34 PM by Bruce Adelsohn

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 12:40 PM by Benet

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 12:42 PM by Janet Croft

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.)

Posted January 27, 2006 12:42 PM by Bob Oldendorf

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 12:54 PM by fidelio

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 12:55 PM by Margaret S.

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 1:02 PM by rhandir

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 1:19 PM by Claude Muncey

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 1:45 PM by rhandir

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 1:50 PM by Lenora Rose

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*

Posted January 27, 2006 1:50 PM by Ailsa Ek

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 1:52 PM by Chris

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 2:02 PM by Paeng

FYI, Forever Amber is still in print, and available from Ingram...

Posted January 27, 2006 2:04 PM by Mr. Bill

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 2:06 PM by P J Evans

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 2:31 PM by Serge

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 2:42 PM by clew

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 2:44 PM by James

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 2:50 PM by Carrie S.

Serge, try the Vintage Crime / Black Lizard crime fiction imprint. Here's their list of Hammett titles.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:03 PM by Eric Sadoyama

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.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:04 PM by Lexica

"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. . .

Posted January 27, 2006 3:06 PM by Sandy B.

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.)

Posted January 27, 2006 3:11 PM by P J Evans

As Eric pointed out, Vintage/Black Lizard has Hammett well in print. Hammett never put together a short story collection himself, but The Big Knockover and The Continental Op have the major ones.

For people interested in Hammett personally, I really liked Jo Hammett's Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. It's not the most objective biography you can get, but that's why I like it.

And I finally find myself finding it natural to pronounce his name correctly. It felt so odd to say "da-SHEEL" at first, but now, when I typed that title above, even in my mind "da-SHEEL" just flowed out. You can teach an old dog new tricks.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:26 PM by Jeffrey Smith

Is that what happened to The Hot Rock? I remember it very fondly, from a 20-year distance. . .

The Robert Redford as Dortmunder flick?
It's available on DVD, or was a couple of years ago, when Kate and I bought it.

It hasn't aged well, at least in the area of pacing-- it's glacially slow by the standards of modern caper flicks. It also include a lengthy "Look, Ma, we rented a helicopter" sequence in the middle, during which they fly several laps around the then-under-construction World Trade Center towers. That hasn't held up well for a different reason.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:27 PM by Chad Orzel

I've always been ambivalent about copyright law, but this post cemented my distaste for the current system.

I wasn't aware that Mazo de la Roche had been a formerly-famous/currently-obscure author. My mother really likes her, and I read most of the Jalna books when I was twelve or thirteen (in the 1990s). I would probably hate Mary Wakefield if I read it today, but it was my first experience with a romance novel about a governess, so I thought it was pretty fabulous and innovative. (Somewhere, Jane Eyre weeps quietly.)

Posted January 27, 2006 3:29 PM by Adobe

P J Evans wrote:
>Lexica wrote:
>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.)

To sum up: reading speed isn't a persuasive element in the arguement, Paeng. For this group (myself included) the idea that

There are likely hundreds of thousands of book titles to choose from covering thousands of years of recorded history and hundreds of countries.

is a challenge, an opportunity, a delight, not an obstacle.

The fact that we almost certainly cannot read all of the possible books isn't the problem; the idea that even some of them might be denied to us by circumstance, that is a problem!

-r.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:33 PM by rhandir

PJ: Only one page a minute? I clock in over 2. [/end gratuitous bragging]

Also, I started reading at 3 years old. I was reading Shakespeare when I was 9. By Paeng's estimate, at 30 years old, I have another thirty years left, which, I assume, means I will die at 60. I know this estimate of books read per lifetime is off for me, and onsidering that the average life expectancy for a woman is somewhere around 75 years, I suspect it may be off for other people too.

In fact, if you grant me the 100 books per summer I used to read, and just even spread them out across the 20 odd years I have been reading "grown-up" books, I've already read 2,000 books!

Posted January 27, 2006 3:35 PM by Nancy C

I used to think I was a fast reader because I can finish a normal-sized mass-market in about 2 hours. Then I met somebody who can read 'em in one. I do slow down when it's a Very Special Book and I don't want it to end. Gives me fits when I need to know how it all comes out, but also need to make it last as long as possible. Speaking of which, is it August yet?

Posted January 27, 2006 3:35 PM by TexAnne

I'm unsettled, as always, by what seems to me to be the assumption that a human-originated phenomenon has anything to do with "nature" and is therefore subject to Darwinian principles. It may *be* so, but it doesn't *have* to be so by the rules of the universe. I don't believe that "falling out of print is a book's natural state." A book's "natural state" is to be there, in your hands. Falling out of print happens because of money and/or the lack of it. There is nothing more Darwinistic, or less natural. Again with the alleged philosopher someone quoted: amnesia may indeed be our natural state, but that doesn't mean it's good or necessary. We transcend it daily, and maybe one day we'll beat it completely.

We have the technology to make "out of print" a meaningless collection of syllables for any book that still, as of this moment, exists in any form. What will prevent that, for a while, is money and the lack of it. But it won't prevent it indefinitely.

Meanwhile, it looks as if the best way for me to make sure that anyone can see my stuff after I'm dead is never to be published at all. (Um, hang on a minute...)

Posted January 27, 2006 3:36 PM by Zander

Reading speed: GWTW in 3 hours cover to cover.

I go through a book about every 2-3 days -- which means I do a lot of re-reading if none of my favorite authors has something new when I finish the latest.

I could finish books faster if I didn't have to work or sleep.

And I re-read a series when a new book is coming out.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:39 PM by Lori Coulson

Lori, I know what you mean by re-reading. At one point I was re-reading the entire Wheel of Time series whenever a new one came out. I stopped around the 7th book, because the series sucked, and it was way too much to slog through to read what I considered the next boring book.

Michelle West, on the other hand, writes thick, okay/fun books. Thickness is a virtue; 700 pages of decent material will hold me 2 or 3 days!

My current beef is Alice Starmore's Fair Isle knitting book. I want it, it's out of print, and $100 is way too much for me to spend right now.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:44 PM by Nancy C

Nancy C: ooh, don't get me started on the knitting books. Constance Hieatt's Principles of Knitting regularly goes for upwards of $300 on eBay, or so I'm told. I want some of Elsebeth Lavold's stuff, too. Fortunately we have libraries! Just be sure you check out the good ancient gems regularly, so they don't sell 'em off.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:53 PM by TexAnne

(Belatedly, thanks John M. Ford for the correction about Anthony Lane. I do have Nobody's Perfect - $5 in a used book store a year ago - but I didn't have it to hand or remember the details.)

Anyway, all this talk has reminded me that there is a Friends of the Library sale going on about 100 yards from my office, so I shall go over and buy Forever Amber.

(It's a University library, so probably not, sadly.)

Posted January 27, 2006 3:57 PM by candle

One of my Best Jobs Ever was an RA gig that involved 20 hours a week reading and then briefly summarizing (maybe 500 words, tops) all the novels on a particular best seller list published between 1900 and 1989.

It was began as a copyright gig for a particular case for a five year span, and the law firm liked what I did so much they hired again to do it for the larger sequence.

It was a lot of fun--even tracking down the books was fun. A number were hard to find.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:59 PM by Lisa Spangenberg

I have the Fair Isle book, somewhere in one of my boxes. My beef is (well, are, because there's two) Starmore's Celtic Knitting calls for yarns that aren't available any more; and Rutt's History of Hand Knitting, as reprinted, doesn't have the color plates (I'd pay for a CD with scanned copies). I also have far too many projects on needles: the yarn to finish the cable afghan is somewhere in one of the boxes; so is the sweatshirt jacket; I just started the Uarn Harlots Snowdrop, in laceweight alpaca, for my-niece-the-budding-lawyer; and there's the scarves for giving away.

Posted January 27, 2006 3:59 PM by P J Evans

(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.)

Charlie, I'm mildly curious as to when this might have been, considering that NESFA has had all of Kornbluth's solo short fiction in print since 1997, and last summer a call to the agency to inquire about two of his novels fairly quickly put me in touch with the responsible agent.

If you know that you want to find Kornbluth's stories, typing his name into Amazon.com will pull up quite a few in-print and out-of-print possibilities. It's not the stuff you already know about that's the problem; in or out of print, you can probably find it. It's the stuff you don't know about, and are unlikely to stumble across accidentally. If the heirs don't understand what a standard publishing contract looks like, and don't understand that any money from old, out-of-print fiction is found money, the hassles involved in getting it back into print can exceed any possible reward.

Posted January 27, 2006 4:00 PM by Lis Carey

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.

Both descriptions of the case are incorrect. The suit was filed by NTP, a patent holding company, against RIM, the company that produces and operates Blackberries. The supposed inventor of the patents in question, Thomas Campana, did die, but not "in poverty, of heartbreak/old age"; he died of esophageal cancer, and apparently was a chainsmoker. Also note (in the story that I linked to) that the USPTO has preliminarily rejected NTP's patents on review.

I supposed that the relevance is that his heirs stand to make out like bandits if his holding company wins the case.

Posted January 27, 2006 4:14 PM by Tom D.

Wire racks are/were primarily the domain for mass market paperbacks (pocket paperbacks) which isn't quite the market it used to be, for good or ill. Sure there were larger such racks for larger hardcover books, but historically they are linked with Mass Market distribution.

Beyond the extended distribution as mentioned above (covers being stripped and returned for credit rather than whole copies), there has also been a change as to WHAT makes it to that particular market. For instance Mad magazine paperbacks, comic strip reprints, many such heavily illustrated humor titles of that ilk, don't go to MM anymore, but to a larger trade paperback, if published at all. But that also means, that same content, may not be available via your local grocer or drugstore anymore either.

What helped kill that sort of content for mass markets, was marketing, books such as B. Klibans cats selling well as point of purchase odd shaped trade paperbacks at point of purchase.

Wire racks don't hold that sort of material anymore. Fiction mostly. Genre Fiction in particular, such as Romance Mystery and Science Fiction Fantasy.

Posted January 27, 2006 4:43 PM by bud landry

Ooooo P J- if you ever want to get rid of Alice Starmore, can I have dibs? I'm willing to pay- just not $100. And I hear you on the projects started and bought for; I have an entire room in my house devoted to fiber- equipment, books and supplies.

TexAnne: Thanks for the word of wisdom on the libraries. Our central branch here has quite a collection; I'