Celebrating the lesser-known at the Internet Archive
Bryan Alexander, longtime reader of Thought Shrapnel shared this with me. January 1st is known as ‘Public Domain Day’ as new works become freely available as their copyright expires.
This interactive ‘tapestry’ was created by Bob Stein, who is founder and co-director of The Institute for the Future of the Book. It’s worth investigating!
On January 1st people celebrate the books entering the public domain after their copywrights expire. This year, that means books published in 1930. Unsurprisingly people focus on the “famous” titles which this year include As I Lay Dying, The Maltese Falcon, four Nancy Drew titles and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I sense that people read the lists and check-off the ones they’ve heard of, but rarely do more. So, I thought it might be interesting to dig a little deeper. Not only is it fun to explore the relatively unknown, I think there’s a lot to be learned by looking at the ways our forebears looked at the world 95 years ago. Public Domain Day is celebrated all over the western world but each country or region has different copyright periods so the newly arrived titles are not the same. This collection is all U.S. based and all the books displayed here are from the Internet Archive.
Source: tapestries.media