Book People Archive

Re: Unpublished works in the UK

Miss Hagglund (9th May) has indeed been fortunate in finding generous
libraries in Britain; my own experience has been the reverse.
             
I had the idea of publishing A.C. Benson's Diary on the internet. It
consists of 179 volumes (estimated to contain four million words), of
which only a few extracts have ever been published. That is not at all
an unmanageable size for a document on the internet, and I thought it
would go well with the rest of his books on my site.

Judging by what little has appeared, I am sure that the complete diaries
possess a great intrinsic interest, and their publication would at last
make available much that is pleasant and worthwhile for the general
reader, and of great value to researchers in the fields of literature,
history, biography etc.

I had much the same idea as Miss Lynn H. (8th May): to take a notebook
computer for a few months. Well I am afraid that that will NOT always
work out.

The manuscripts are held in the Pepys Library of Magdalene College at
Cambridge. The Pepys Librarian, Dr. Luckett, to whom I wrote early in
2000, told me that I would be permitted to consult the manuscript for
a period of no more than one hour daily (but not every day of the week).
Between May and August I would be permitted two hours on certain days of
the week, but during other lengthy periods, amounting to several months,
the library would not be open at all. I would NOT be allowed to
transcribe or photocopy it.

And he wrote: "under no circumstances can I permit the Diary's
appearance on the Internet since the College is actively involved with
the far more desirable propect of commercial publication."

Quite frankly, I do not believe that "actively". The diary has not been
published during the past 75 years, and in the present circumstances it
appears unlikely ever to be.

This is a good example of the reprehensible and shameful way in which
things of true value are commercialized and thus suppressed in our
money-based society, even by the universities. It is reprehensible and
shameful that money should be the motive for witholding publication when
free publication has been offered. Even if the librarian's story about
money, or the hope of money, is false, it is still reprehensible and
shameful for publication to be withheld for whatever reason.

What Benson himself would have wished, we can only guess. He did die a
rich man; that was mainly due to his American benefactress.
             
           R. W. Bamford (Golden Gale Electronic Library)

(And I've got another horror story about the British Library and
Edward Warren/Arthur Raile . . . )


Miss Hugglund (gcoffi@[redacted] wrote:
>
> My understanding (although I'm not a lawyer so I might not be fully
> informed) is that in the UK, copyright doesn't really come into it for
> unpublished older works but ownership definitely does.
>       
> The library or archive or individual that owns the physical artefact can
> decide to restrict permission to publish. I think it's equivalent to a
> museum which can decide whether to let you take a picture of a painting
> and whether they will charge you for publishing that picture.
> 
> In practice, however, most UK libraries are very happy to negotiate and
> most won't charge for publication unless that publication is likely to
> make you a lot of money.

> >Lynn H wrote:
> >> I am toying with the idea of going to England for
> >> several months someday, taking a small scanner and a notebook > >> computer.