Public Domain Day 2025

Just a quick blog post today as I’m doing a bit of holiday traveling! 

This year’s Public Domain Day is pretty fantastic. For those of you who don’t know, Public Domain Day is the day that copywriter works enter the public domain. For books under a US copyright, books, art, music, and some other works enter the public domain 75 years after publication (generally speaking). My favorite place to explore what’s entering the public domain is this Duke university website. 

This year, then works published in 1929 enter the public domain. It includes Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.  I was happy to see two Dashiell Hammett books: Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon as serialized in Black Mask. I’ve not read Robert Grave’s Good-bye to All That, but I’m more likely to now that I can download a free copy. 

The trick of course is to find versions of these book online. 

The other great thing is volumes of serials published in 1929. I’ve been reading back issues of Prairie Schooner and now you can read volume 3 for free. Volume 15 of The Midland (if you can find it!). Or volume 10 of Frontier magazine (of course, you can read all the volumes of Frontier which merged with The Midland in 1933 on the University of Montana’s archives website). Volume 19 of North Dakota Quarterlyis also now in the public domain!

Of course, entering the public domain is more than just being free. It means that you can take something like Volume IX of the Annual of ASOR, which was published in 1929, and do whatever you want with it! You can feed it to your AI program, you can turn it into poetry, and you can republish it and sell it for tens of dozens of … pennies. 

It’s always great to see new material entering the commons at the start of the year.