Facts, Fables, and Footnotes for the Week of January 1, 2022

JANUARY 1 — JANUARY 7, 2023

Here are the books entering the public domain in 2023.

In 2019, for the first time in over two decades, a new crop of literary work entered the public domain: everything first published in the United States in 1923. (Don’t forget the secret public domain books, either.) In 2020, books by E.M. Forster, Edna Ferber, and Edith Wharton became available for remixing. 2021 brought us everything published in 1925, “the greatest year for books,” including, of course, The Great Gatsby (yes, a sequel was published immediately, with plenty more in the works). And last year, notably, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh passed through the veil, leading, inevitably and unfortunately, to this.

So what’s on the table this year? Though copyright laws differ from country to country, on January 1st, 2023, books that were published in 1927 will enter the public domain in the United States. Here’s a selection of the most interesting:

Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Agatha Christie, The Big Four

Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets

Franklin W. Dixon, The Tower Treasure (The Hardy Boys #1)

Franklin W. Dixon, The House on the Cliff (The Hardy Boys #2)

Franklin W. Dixon, The Secret of the Old Mill (The Hardy Boys #3)

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger”

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place”

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Franz Kafka, Amerika

Anita Loos, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Get those remixes ready! But don’t you dare make Mrs. Ramsay into an axe murderer.

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MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Turn Every Page explores the remarkable 50-year relationship between two literary legends, writer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb. Now 86, Caro is working to complete the final volume of his masterwork, The Years of Lyndon Johnson; Gottlieb, 91, waits to edit it. The task of finishing their life’s work looms before them. With humor and insight, this unique double portrait reveals the work habits, peculiarities, and professional joys of these two ferocious intellects at the culmination of a journey that has consumed both their lives and impacted generations of politicians, activists, writers, and readers.

“The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”

—VIRGINIA WOOLF,
To the Lighthouse

In other (old)

news this week

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is published anonymously in an edition of just 500 copies (January 1, 1818) • Stephen Crane survives the sinking of The Commodore off the coast of Florida—he will use his experience as the basis for his short story “The Open Boat” (January 2, 1897) • Popular English novelist Marie Corelli is convicted of hoarding food and fined £50 (January 2, 1918) • Jean Toomer’s Cane—which would become one of the most important books of the Harlem Renaissance—is accepted for publication (January 2, 1923) • Baroness Emma Orczy’s play The Scarlet Pimpernel opens at the New Theatre in London’s West End (January 5, 1905) • Not always a connoisseur of artistic failure, Samuel Beckett’s play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) premieres at the tiny Théâtre de Babylone in Paris (January 5, 1953) • Sherlock Holmes is born—according to fans, but not according to Arthur Conan Doyle, who did not deign to give his famous detective a birthday (January 6, 1854 or 1853) • The Georgetown-IBM experiment, an early demonstration of machine translation, was performed in New York (January 7, 1954)

“To tell the truth, I don’t think the odds are very good that we can solve our immediate problems. I think the chances that civilization will survive more than another 30 years—that it will still be flourishing in 2010—are less than 50 percent.”

Born this week in 1920

“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.”

Born this week in 1932

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