U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1975 July - December
U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1975 July - December
This is not a book to read. It is a book to consult, to mine, to unravel. Compiled by the Library of Congress Copyright Office, this catalog documents every copyright renewal filed between July and December 1975, a six-month snapshot of the American publishing industry's bet on its own past. Each entry represents a work first copyrighted in the late 1920s or 1930s that publishers deemed still valuable enough to renew: novels, textbooks, religious pamphlets, scientific monographs, the obscure and the once-bestselling. For historians of publishing, this is a primary source of considerable power. For anyone tracing the cultural output of mid-century America, it is an indispensable index. For lawyers and librarians determining whether a work entered the public domain, it is the official record. The dry format belies what lies within: a necrology of cultural survival, a quiet testament to what the market once decided was worth preserving.
