Category: Public Domain
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Poem: At Memphis Station by Johannes V. Jensen (1983-1950)
English translation of the poem by Danish author Jonannes V. Jensen.
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Walt Whitman & Levi’s Jeans
Here’s an amazing TV commercial for Levi’s Jeans starring…. Walt Whitman! Yes, that’s his actual voice reading the 1888 poem America in this video poem/commercial. Here’s another video poem for Whitman’s Pioneers from Leaves of Grass..this time read by actor Will Greer. (These pieces are directed by M. Blash of the ad agency Wieden &…
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Charles Dickens on Email (1856)
Charles Dickens on electronic communication: O, what a thing it is, in a time of danger and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face! I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much is any man,…
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Bouguereau: Pro and Con
You may not know about Fred Ross, but he is chairman of the Art Renewal Center, a leading online museum that stores high quality paintings. It is a treasure trove for people looking for public domain paintings. Here’s his take on Bouguereau: In October 1977, I walked into the Clark Museum, Williamstown, Mass. to see…
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Uncle Yorick
Randomly came across this painting by Phillip H. Calderon (Died 1937). A commenter says: “In this typical family scene, so popular with the Victorians, young Hamlet rides on the back of Yorick, with Gertrude sitting near by. Can we imagine that the woman holding the child is the wife of Polonius with her baby…
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What I’ve been reading
Gosh, I’ve been reading some great stuff recently. Truth Book by Joy Castro. Poetic memoir about her turbulent childhood. Written by college friend. I’ll post a review later. Solomon Scandals (unpublished) by David Rothman. Unpublished political intrigue novel by Teleread editor. Information Architecture for the WWW by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld. Earlier editions were…
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Social Aspects of Books (and Ebooks)
Here’s another piece by Cory Doctorow on the publishing industry and google. Familiar stuff to those already aquainted with his writings on copyright, but he finishes the essay with a point about the social aspects of books: This pincer movement is gradually squeezing books out of the lives of much of the traditional audience for…
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Discourager of Hesitancy by Frank Stockton
Many readers have heard of Frank Stockton’s famous story, The Lady or the Tiger. But very few have heard of the sequel which I am reprinting in full here.
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Public Domain, Brevity
Series of articles on the public domain. Will read and comment later. Brevity has another issue of creative nonfiction out. This is one of my fave litmags, and yet I hate reading it on a PC. Dinty Moore specializes in short forms, and today I bought his Accidental Buddhist. BTW, if you’re ever in the…
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Flood Water Blues & Public Domain Torrents
Houston-born jazz singer Sippie Wallace’s 1927 song, Flood Water Blues (Real Media) was about the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Bluesy, heartbreaking, certainly worth remembering on this day. In the meantime, Terry Teachout wonders aloud about the safety of jazz archives in New Orleans: A question to anyone in the New Orleans area who is…
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Art Resource Center
A few months ago I compiled a list of resources for finding public domain paintings. The best source of high quality public domain paintings seems to be Art Resource Center. Just fantastic. Here’s some beautiful nudes by Guillaume Seignac, a French painter who died in 1924. (and very little exists on the web about this…
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Victorian Public Domain Paintings and William Holman Hunt
Victorianweb Paintings is an exhaustive online collection of British painters from the Victorian period. Apparently the father of Violet Hunt was Alfred Hunt, a noted pre-Raphaalite painter at the time. To complicate things, there was a William Holman Hunt who, though he lived once at the same address, was not related. (I need to verify…
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Google: William Gerhardie’s Futility
Tim O’Reilly and company weigh in on the google/library issues. This may be a side issue to the main issue, but I frequently try to research old titles that might be public domain, or might not. One terribly confusing thing is that publishers frequently release “new editions” with trivial post-1922 changes/additions to pre-1922 works. It…
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Violet Hunt Part 2
More things found about Violet Hunt: Nancy Smith discusses the section on Violet Hunt in Deborah Martinson’s book ” In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction” When she was in her forties, she hooked up with Ford, an up-and-coming writer in his early 30s. He was already married, but separated, not…
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Who is Violet Hunt?
I’ve been going through birthdates of authors and just discovered an author who might be a very interesting project for me. Violet Hunt. Here’s what wikipedia has on her: Isobel Violet Hunt (September 28 1862 January 16, 1942) was a British writer, now best known for her supernatural fiction. Her father was the artist…
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Pre-1923 Writers
Another thing. A few weeks ago I linked to an IMDB page showing what movies were released in 1930 (and would have gone into the public domain). Often it is very difficult to search for pre-1923 authors, but this site helps somewhat. This page lists all the authors born in a particular year, and you…