Happy Public Domain Day

[silverscreenselect]

It's New Years, which means that a bunch of new books, movies, songs, and other literary works are now in the public domain. Laws vary from country to country, but in the United States, all works first produced in 1930 (and whose copyrights had not previously expired) and sound recordings from 1925 are now in the public domain. As a corollary, I'm always amazed at how many public domain works are still offered for sale on Amazon in ebook form, even though pretty much anything you'd want to read is readily available through Project Gutenberg and other public domain repositories.

Among the works available today:

• William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
  Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon (full book version)
  Agatha Christie - The Murder at the Vicarage (first Miss Marple novel)
  The Little Engine That Could (illustrated version)
  The Secret of the Old Clock (first Nancy Drew novel)
  Elson Basic Readers (first appearance of Dick and Jane)
  Noel Coward - Private Lives
  T.S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday
  Edna Ferber - Cimarron
  J.B. Priestley - Angel Pavement
  Somerset Maugham - Cakes and Ale
  Bertrand Russell - The Conquest of Happiness
  All Quiet on the Western Front (movie)
  Cimarron (1930 movie)
  Animal Crackers (Marx Brothers)
  Soup to Nuts (featuring The Three Stooges)
  Morocco
  The Blue Angel (Marlene Dietrich)
  The Big Trail (John Wayne's first lead role)
  Murder! (Alfred HItchcock)
  I've Got Rhythm, Embraceable You, I've Got a Crush on You (Gershwins)
  Georgia on My Mind
  Dream a Little Dream of Me
  On the Sunny Side of the Street
  Body and Soul
  Just a Gigolo
  Beyond the Blue Horizon

Also Betty Boop, Disney's Pluto (under its original name of Rover), and Blondie and Dagwood.