Out-of-copyright update

In April, I wrote a blog post about many creative works entering the public domain because their protections expired. Recently, I found an article from August reporting that many books published before 1964 have already been in the public domain because their creators did not actively pursue copyright protections. This gives us a source for finding many more lesser-known fairy tales that were in the public domain all along.

The Secretly Public Domain page on the Mastodon social media site, which I found through the previous article, publicizes individual works in the public domain. I have gone through every update to date and found the following entries from related fields that would be of interest to the fairy-tale scholar:

Rip Van Winkle and The legend of Sleepy Hollow (1951 edition), Washington Irving

The Mermaids (1956), Eva Boros

An annotated collection of Mongolian riddles (1954), Archer Taylor

Slavic folklore, a symposium (1956), Albert Bates Lord

And these about children:

Move on, Youth! (1940), T. Otto Nall

The Psychology of Childhood (1930), Edgar James Swift

The moderator of this account has been publishing “toots” since July. The most recent update was a few hours ago. This site will be a good place to monitor every so often for more fairy-tale content.