The Travelin' Librarian

What do all of the following works have in common?

• The first two volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
• Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (his own translation/adaptation of the original version in French, En attendant Godot, published in 1952)
• Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim
• Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception
• Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!
• Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O
• Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, subtitled “The influence of comic books on today’s youth"
• Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants
• Alan Le May’s The Searchers< /li>
• C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, the fifth volume of The Chronicles of Narnia
• Alice B. Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

Give up? All of these works, and more, would have gone into the public domain on 1 January 2011 had not the Copyright Act of 1976 been passed. For the full story and more examples check out the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

About Michael

Michael Sauers is currently the Technology Innovation Librarian for the Nebraska Library Commission in Lincoln, Nebraska and has been training librarians in technology for more than 15 years. He has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller. He earned his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael’s tenth book, Blogging & RSS: A Librarian’s Guide, Second Edition was published October 2010 with three more books to be published in 2012. He has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs Web sites for authors and historical societies, takes many, many photos, and reads more than 100 books a year.

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