Book People Archive

Re: Unpublished works in the UK

Since there are no copyrights in the works, why not stay silent about your
intentions, bring
a digital camara with sufficient sensitivity that you need not flash, and
plenty of memory, and
photograph the whole thing in a few sittings. All not explicitly forbidden
is allowed.

Since it is unpublished material, in the EU you'll probably be able to get a
25 year copyright for publishing it.

Some librarians are not as restrictive, and even let you carry in a scanner
and notebook to scan
materials. Most likely concern is fragility of materials.

Jeroen


----- Original Message -----
From: <ggbooks@[redacted]>
To: <spok+bookpeople@[redacted]>
Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2001 8:13 AM
Subject: Re: [BP] Unpublished works in the UK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 . . . )