Just about two weeks ago, on 1 January 2023, the USA enjoyed Public Domain Day, the day when all works published in the US in 1927 (except for sound recordings) passed into the public domain.
Other sites have talked about the Important Books that entered the public domain, books by Hemingway and Herman Hesse and Virginia Woolf and so forth.
But what about pulp fiction? There were western and detective pulps that published weekly, fifty-two issues a year of pulp glory. And 1927 was a prime year for the "million word a year" men, authors who supplied the pulps with hundreds of thousands of words of story for the ever-ravenous pulp market.
Curiously, it seems to have been an off year for two of them. Checking the FictionMags Index, it looks like Johnston McCulley (creator of Zorro) "only" had twenty stories published in the pulps in '27. And none of them serialized novels. For McCulley, that's definitely a slow year.
Less off his stride was J. Allan Dunn, with sixty-three stories that year, a substantial number of them under a house name for Wild West Weekly. Only four serials among them, one of which was in Boy's Life, and so likely shorter than novel length.
Then there is Max Brand. He might seem like a slacker with only twenty-four titles published in 1927 pulp magazines. But that's before you count how many of them were novels: Nine, with eleven more listed as novellas that either might make novel length on their own (FictionMags Index sometimes gets length wrong), or part of serial novellas that were later collected together as novels.
Let's stick to just the novels. Here are the original titles:
- Comanche
- Smiling Charlie
- The Western Double
- Thunder Moon
- The City In The Sky
- Sawdust and Six-Guns
- The Silver Stork
- Thunder Moon — Squaw Man
- Pleasant Jim
Comanche was published as a book in 1950 under the title Single Jack.
Smiling Charlie saw book publication in 1931.
The Western Double was published in book form as The Long Chance in 1941 (and as The Safety Killer in Great Britain in 1942).
The Thunder Moon books get a bit more complicated, of course, because in between the two novels are two novellas, and the book publications of them divided things even a bit differently than might seem obvious. Thunder Moon saw book publication in 1969. The novellas "Red Wind and Thunder Moon", "Thunder Moon — Pale Face", and the first part of the novel Thunder Moon — Squaw Man, were "rewritten and abridged" and published in 1982 as Thunder Moon's Challenge. The remainder of Thunder Moon — Squaw Man was collected (and "abridged and rewritten") with the 1928 story "Thunder Moon Goes White" and published as Thunder Moon Strikes, also in 1982.
("Abridged and rewritten" is generally code for "the heirs want to extend the copyright term as long as possible", and frankly, Brand's heirs, or at least the publisher/agency that oversees his IPs, have struck me as less than totally honest. There's a novel they "saved" from the public domain by publishing it with "restored material" in the late 1990s. Not having access to the original publication, I have no way of analyzing how much bunk that claim is, but it's certainly suspicious. Another book by another author, published through the same agency, had a new copyright because of "restored material", and having one of the magazine installments of the original serial publication, I can confidently assert that it was a lie.)
The City In The Sky was published in book form (in 1948, after Brand's death) as Flaming Irons.
Sawdust and Six-Guns saw book publication in 1950 under the original title, and a few years later as Tenderfoot.
The Silver Stork was published in book form for the first time in 1965, more than twenty years after Brand's death, as The Guns of Dorking Hollow. (It's very odd for any Brand novel to be cursed with two substandard titles.)
Pleasant Jim was published as a book in 1928, under its own title and the Brand pen name, though a 1955 reprint gave it the new title of Six-Gun Ambush.
Am I going to be publishing any of these? Maybe.
My backlog is enormous, I'm working on getting out books (including Brand books) that I had scheduled for April 2022 and later. However, reading Brand is always a pleasure, and while a number of these books are already available on the web (since Brand died in 1944, all of his works are public domain in Australia and Canada, and in another year, will be public domain virtually everywhere except the USA), they are not on Project Gutenberg... so that cuts out a step in my process, or several, and I can just read them and enjoy, keeping an eye out for any mistakes the original proofreaders might have made. (Which has happened. One Brand book was missing several chapters off the ending, at a site that actually does proofread. My edition is not missing those chapters.) Also, I have a physical copy of *The Tenderfoot* in the iktaPOP Source Code Library, and that doesn't seem to be available online anywhere, so scanning that in and publishing it is probably in the cards at some point.
But before any of those, I still have five or six (or seven) Brands that I had hoped to publish last year to get through, along with all the rest of the backlog, and prep work for October, when I plan to release both the usual Eerie Collection, but also a robust Victober Collection (yes, I'm crazy).
I'm currently rethinking publishing/release schedules, because I clearly can't hit the book a week pace I aimed for from the beginning.
