Author Archives: John Mark Ockerbloom

In 1857, work began on a revolutionary new dictionary covering the entire history of English word usage with example quotations. The first installment of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, covering A through Ant, appeared in 1884. The last, … Continue reading →

Sometimes one work’s arrival in the public domain brings extras along with it. In two days, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page, which Peter Marks called “the best play about newspapering ever written”, joins the public domain. … Continue reading →

John Taine’s science fiction novel Green Fire is set in 1990, and some of what it describes fits that time, like television and mobile phones. Other aspects, like gender and social customs, read much more like 1928, the year it … Continue reading →

While Lady Chatterley’s Lover was eventually published intact, Djuna Barnes’s first novel Ryder never was. Barnes replaced passages she was forced to cut with asterisks, “showing plainly”, she wrote, “where the war, so blindly waged on the written word, has … Continue reading →

One of the longest-running “Can we publish this?” questions in literature concerns Lady Chatterley’s Lover. D. H. Lawrence first issued his erotic novel in Italy in 1928. The UK and US banned it, and also stymied its copyright. Later court … Continue reading →

Harlem Renaissance composer Harry Lawrence Freeman wrote his opera Voodoo in 1914. In 1928 he registered its copyright, and had it first performed on a radio program, and then staged in New York with a full orchestra. Obscurity followed. Voodoo … Continue reading →

“1928 was the annus mirabilis of the carol, particularly the Christmas carol,” write Jeremy Summerly and John Francis, not least for The Oxford Book of Carols. Instead of severe chant or sentimental Victoriana, editors Percy Dearmer, Martin Shaw, and Ralph … Continue reading →

The US copyright system often makes it hard to determine the end of an artwork’s copyright. But we know it ends soon for N. C. Wyeth’s painting “Mary Rode on Thistles… and Joseph Waded the Stream Below”, which the Brandywine … Continue reading →

The first all-talking feature wasn’t a prestige film, and initially wasn’t even meant to be a feature film, but the gangster movie Lights of New York grew in the making, and its box office success helped convince studios to completely … Continue reading →