Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats

Millions of Cats (1928), the oldest American picture book still in print, is the work of the American artist, author, translator, and illustrator Wanda Gág. The hand-lettered text, done by the author’s brother, tells the story of an elderly couple who live comfortably, but realize that they are very lonely. The wife wants a cat to love, so her husband sets off in search of a beautiful one to bring home to her. After travelling far away from home, he finds a hillside covered in “cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats...” This rhythmic phrase is repeated several other times throughout the story. Wanda Gag pioneered the double-page spread in this book. Writer and reviewer Anita Silvey explained, “She used both pages to move the story forward, putting them together with art that sweeps across the entire page spread: her favorite illustration fell in the center of the book - with the old man carrying cats against the rolling hills.” Millions of Cats is on the New York Public Library’s list of 100 Great Children’s Books. (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 70 years” and “life plus 50 years” copyright.

Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera

Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) is a German “play with music” by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay’s 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar’s Opera, and four ballads by François Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. It opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. The influential play is a satirical take on society, crime, and morality. Set in the grim underbelly of London, the narrative follows the antihero Macheath, known as Mack the Knife, and his exploits as a criminal. and i the process explores the corrupting influence of capitalism, the blurred lines between good and evil, and the nature of justice. With influences from jazz and German dance music, songs from The Threepenny Opera have been widely covered and become standards, most notably “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”) and “Seeräuberjenny” (“Pirate Jenny”). (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright.

André Breton’s Nadja

André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja (1928) explores the dreamlike and enigmatic encounters with an imaginative woman who later became mentally ill. Through a blend of autobiography and fiction, Breton delves into the realm of the subconscious, where reality and dreams intermingle. The narrative unfolds as a series of chance meetings, discussions, and musings on the nature of love and identity. In many ways Nadja captures the essence of the surrealist movement, emphasizing the irrational and the unexpected. (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright.

Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie

Steamboat Willie is a 1928 animated short film directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. Produced in black and white by Walt Disney Studios, the cartoon is considered the debut of both Mickey and Minnie Mouse, although both characters appeared in a test screening of Plane Crazy several months earlier. Steamboat Willie is especially notable for being one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, as well as one of the first cartoons to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons. Music for Steamboat Willie was arranged by Wilfred Jackson and Bert Lewis, and it included the songs “Steamboat Bill”, a composition popularized by baritone Arthur Collins during the 1910s, and “Turkey in the Straw”, a composition popularized within minstrelsy during the 19th century. The film has received wide critical acclaim, not only for introducing one of the world’s most popular cartoon characters but also for its technical innovation. In 1994, members of the animation field voted *Steamboat Willie* 13th in the book The 50 Greatest Cartoons, which listed the greatest cartoons of all time. However, the film has been the center of a variety of controversies, notably regarding the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act passed in the United States. It was close to entering the public domain in the U.S. several times: each time, copyright protection was extended. It could have entered the public domain in four different years: first in 1955, renewed to 1986, then to 2003 by the Copyright Act of 1976, and then to 2023 by the Copyright Term Extension Act (also known pejoratively as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”) of 1998. It has been claimed that these extensions were a response by Congress to extensive lobbying by The Walt Disney Company. (Wikipedia)

Watch the film on YouTube (from the official Walt Disney Animation Studios channel)

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness (1928) is a lesbian novel by British author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose “sexual inversion” (homosexuality) is apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as typically suffered by “inverts”, with predictably debilitating effects. The novel portrays “inversion” as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: “Give us also the right to our existence”. Shortly after the book’s publication, it became the target of a campaign by James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express. Douglas wrote that “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” A British court judged it obscene because it defended “unnatural practices between women” and it would not be published again in England for another two decades. In the United States, the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court. Publicity over the legal battles increased the visibility of lesbians in British and American culture, and for decades it was the best-known lesbian novel in English, and often the first source of information about lesbianism that young people could find. (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 70 years” and “life plus 50 years” copyright.

Read on Project Gutenberg and Faded Page

Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a novel by Siegfried Sassoon, first published in 1928 by Faber and Faber. Prior to its publication, Sassoon’s reputation rested entirely on his poetry, mostly written during and about World War I. Only ten years after the war ended, after some experience of journalism, did he feel ready to branch out into prose. So uncertain was he of the wisdom of this move that he elected to publish Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man anonymously. It is a depiction of his early years presented in the form of an autobiographical novel, with false names being given to the central characters, including Sassoon himself, who appears as “George Sherston”. Sassoon was motivated to write the work by a war incident, when a fox was loose in the trenches and one of his friends shot and killed it, though it also draws heavily on his pre-war life, with riding and hunting being among the favourite pastimes of the author. Much of the material for the novel came from Sassoon’s own diaries and he said he was inspired by the work of Marcel Proust: “A few pages of Proust have made me wonder whether insignificant episodes aren’t the most significant”. (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright.

Read on Project Gutenberg

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall is the debut novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928. Based, in part, on Waugh’s schooldays at Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales, the book is a social satire that employs the author’s characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s. While the title is a contraction of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it also alludes to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse. Waugh read both Gibbons and Spengler while writing the book. Indeed, Waugh’s satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and “themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam...both drive the novel forward and fuel its humour.” Waugh himself stated in his ‘Author’s Note’ to the first edition: ‘Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.’ (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright.

Read on Project Gutenberg

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography has been described as a history of English literature in satiric form. Arguably one of Woolf’s most popular novels, it was inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover and close friend. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women’s writing and gender and transgender studies. (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 70 years” and “life plus 50 years” copyright.

Read on Project Gutenberg and Faded Page

A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner

The House at Pooh Corner is a 1928 children’s book by A. A. Milne and illustrated by E. H. Shepard. This book is the second novel, and final one by Milne, to feature Winnie-the-Pooh and his world. The book is also notable for introducing the character, Tigger, a bouncy and energetic tiger. The collection of tales include Eeyore’s birthday celebration, Pooh’s attempt to catch a Heffalump, and an “expotition” to the North Pole. Amidst the lighthearted moments, the book takes a poignant turn in the final chapter as Christopher Robin and Pooh share a heartfelt conversation about the inevitability of growing up. (Wikipedia)

Already public domain in countries with a “life plus 50 years” copyright.

October: Ten Days That Shook the World directed by Sergei Eisenstein

October: Ten Days That Shook the World (in Russian: Октябрь (Десять дней, которые потрясли мир) is a 1928 Soviet silent historical film written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov. It is a celebratory dramatization of the 1917 October Revolution, one of two films commissioned by the Soviet government to honour the tenth anniversary of the event. Eisenstein used the film to further develop his theories of film structure, using a concept he described as “intellectual montage”, the editing together of shots of apparently unconnected objects in order to create and encourage intellectual comparisons between them. One of the film’s most celebrated examples of this technique is a baroque image of Jesus that is compared, through a series of shots, to Hindu deities, the Buddha, Aztec gods, and finally a primitive idol in order to suggest the sameness of all religions; the idol is then compared with military regalia to suggest the linking of patriotism and religious fervour by the state. In another sequence Alexander Kerensky, head of the pre-Bolshevik revolutionary Provisional Government, is compared to a preening mechanical peacock. Eisenstein’s montage experiments met with official disapproval; the authorities complained that *October* was unintelligible to the masses, and Eisenstein was attacked—for neither the first time nor the last—for excessive “formalism”. He was also required to re-edit the work to expurgate references to Leon Trotsky, who had recently been purged by Joseph Stalin. (Wikipedia)

Watch the film on Internet Archive with English subtitles.

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) was a notable French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, and poet closely associated with the Dada movement. Considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as “shape-shifting” or “kaleidoscopic”. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France before denouncing it in 1921. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment. Some of his significant works include I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie and Dances at the Spring. (Wikipedia)

Works by Francis Picabia on Wikimedia Commons

Cecil Hepworth

Cecil Hepworth (1874–1953) was a pioneer in the British film industry, known for his contributions as a film director, producer, and screenwriter. He played a significant role in the early development of the British film industry and continued making films into the 1920s through his company Hepworth Picture Plays. His notable works include Alice in Wonderland (1903), the first film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s children’s book, and Rescued by Rover (1905), an early example of narrative cinema. By 1910, Hepworth was also the inventor of Vivaphone, an early sound on disk system for adding sound to motion pictures. (Wikipedia)

Works by Cecil Hepworth on Internet Archive

Read about his *How It Feels to Be Run Over* (1900) on The Public Domain Review

Django Reinhardt

Jean Reinhardt (1910–1953), known by his Romani nickname Django, was a Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer. He was one of the first major jazz talents to emerge in Europe and has been hailed as one of its most significant exponents. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Reinhardt formed the Paris-based Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. The group was among the first to play jazz that featured the guitar as a lead instrument. Reinhardt recorded in France with many visiting American musicians, including Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, and briefly toured the United States with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1946. Reinhardt’s most popular compositions have become standards within gypsy jazz, including “Minor Swing”, “Daphne”, “Belleville”, “Djangology”, “Swing ’42”, and “Nuages”. Jazz guitarist Frank Vignola says that nearly every major popular-music guitarist in the world has been influenced by Reinhardt. He died suddenly of a stroke in 1953 at the age of 43. (Wikipedia)

Works by Django Reinhardt on Internet Archive

Hank Williams

Hank Williams (1923–1953) was a legendary American singer-songwriter, known for recording 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart. Despite his relatively brief career – he died at age 29 from heart failure after many years of alcohol and drug abuse – he is one of the most celebrated and influential musicians of the 20th century, especially in country music. Many artists have covered his songs and he has influenced Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, among others. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, the Native American Music Awards Hall of Fame in 1999, and gained a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2010 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his “craftsmanship as a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life.” (Wikipedia)

Works by Hank Williams on Internet Archive

J. R. R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was an English writer and philologist, renowned as the author of high fantasy works, including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of his books led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused him to be popularly identified as the “father” of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy. (Wikipedia)