U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1957 January - June
U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1957 January - June
A frozen moment in American cultural memory, this official catalog records every copyright renewal filed with the US government between January and June 1957. Here, alphabetically by author, lie the works deemed commercially vital enough to protect: novels, children's books, academic treatises, poetry collections, and serials. Some names have endured. Others survive here only as entries in a government ledger, their commercial lives already fading. For historians and bibliographers, this document is a rare primary source that reveals what the American publishing industry considered worth safeguarding at mid-century, and who held those rights as they transferred from authors to estates and publishers. It's not a book to read so much as to consult, to trace the lifecycle of a work through its legal existence, to discover what was being read and re-issued in the spring of 1957.
