Every year COMMUNIA celebrates “Public Domain Day” on January 1st, featuring authors as they enter the public domain in different regions. This year the group featured Isaac Babel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emma Goldman, and Nathanael West. UPDATE: Grove/Atlantic associate publisher Eric Price added some additional commentary below.
We’ve included the entire featured author list below. Public domain works are shared in free eBook format on sites like Project Gutenberg. They are also used in monster mashups by Quirk Books, as Sarah Weinman reminded us in a tweet: “That means we should await the imminent release of THE MASTER DRINKS MARGARITAS from Quirk Books. Or perhaps TENDER IS THE FRIGHT?”
Here’s more about how the site calculates public domain status: “The information presented on this website about works entering the public domain are based on a rough “life plus seventy years” computation. This is certainly wrong for some jurisdictions and/or for some types of work (see, for instance, this list.) Moreover, the fact that the works of a given author are in the public domain in a jurisdiction does NOT mean (unfortunately) that those works are also public domain in other jurisdictions.” (Via Edward Champion)
UPDATE: Grove/Atlantic associate publisher Eric Price added this commentary: “Sarah Weinman’s concept and title, THE MASTER DRINKS MARGARITAS, is absolutely brilliant. However due to the copyright being restored under GATT, we will have to wait sometime for such a book, using the original text that is still protected under copyright law, to be published. Only the translations that were in print prior to the copyright being restored are allowed to be in print and are protected by the copyright law and associated international treaties.”
Isaac Babel
Walter Benjamin
John Buchan
Mikhail Bulgakov
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Emma Goldman
Paul Klee
Selma Lagerlof
Leon Trotsky
Vito Volterra
Nathanael West