Here is a selection of news from elsewhere on the literary web:
A woman in New York is attempting to smell 300,000 books, making notes as she goes. As of 12 December, she was up to 150. It’s art.
F Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, John Buchan and Isaac Babel are among the authors who may or may not be going out of copyright this year. The list comes courtesy of ‘Public Domain Day’, which exists to ‘celebrate the role of the public domain in our societies’, but also, perhaps inadvertently, highlights the difficulty of knowing the public domain’s extent. (The British situation, for instance, is complicated by the copyright term having been extended by 20 years about a decade ago, with the result that some of those writers’ books were already available in supercheap editions. Lawyerly readers with some idea what’s actually going on are particularly welcome to comment.
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