We’re fast approaching the copyright release season, at the start of 2025. Authors who died in 1954, and books and magazines published in 1929. Here are some items I dug up, which may interest Tentaclii readers. Possibly there may be some I’ve missed, and if so please comment.

Writers who died in 1954:

* Edwin Baird, first editor of Weird Tales. Books included…

The City Of Purple Dreams (anon)
The Heart Of Virginia Keep
Fay
Will-O’-The Wisp

In movies, the writers for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse.

Individual unusual books of interest, from authors who died in 1954:

Verse and voice:

Aesop’s Fables Arranged For Voice.
The Poems Of Wales.
The Anthology Of Nonsense Verse. [Reed, 1925].

Potential for graphic-novel adaptations?:

Herodotus, Father Of History. [Presumably a popular biography].
Birth Of A Spitfire. [How they were made, 1941].
The Psychology & Tradition Of Colour.

Activities that don’t age:

Clog Dancing Made Easy.
Shell Collector’s Handbook.

And a couple of local items only of interest to myself, but I’ll note them anyway. Louis Mellard, whose 1920s books included the intriguingly titled Lost Romances Of The Midlands, Tramp Artist In Derbyshire, and others.

Books and other publications of note from 1929:

Some of these may already be public-domain due to the author’s death-date.

* Aleister Crowley

Moonchild
The Stratagem and Other Stories

* Frank Owen

The Wind That Tramps the World

* Maurice Reynard

The Hands of Orlac

* Sax Rhomer

Book of Fu-Manchu

* M.P. Shiel.

The Purple Cloud (revision)

* William Seabrook

The Magic Island (first-hand book dealing with voodoo zombies, though a recent Lovecraft Annual essay convincingly shows that Lovecraft had invented the modern horror zombie)

* Joseph Gaer

Burning Bush (Jewish fairy tales)

* Richard Tooker

The Day of the Brown Horde (neolithic ‘ancient man’ novel, well-known in its day)

* John Taine

The Greatest Adventure (Antarctic horror-adventure)

* Forrest Reid

Walter De La Mare; A Critical Study.

* A. A. Milne

Toad of Toad Hall (from the world of Wind in the Willows).

* Lynd Ward

Gods’ Man: a novel in woodcuts. (proto graphic-novel)

* Anthologies

I see The Great Weird Stories (Duffield, 1929), and Master Detective Stories (Clode, 1929).

Known to Lovecraft:

* Bertrand Hart

His Providence Journal “The Sideshow” columns for 1929, in which he jousted with Lovecraft and others.

* de Castro (Lovecraft revisionist)

Portrait of Ambrose Bierce (1929, actually revised by Frank Belknap Long).

* Myrta Alice Little

“Sweet Christmas Time” (published poem, 1929).

* Everett McNeil

The Shores of Adventure; or, Exploring in the New World with Jacques Cartier (1929, though some chicanery appears to have kept his later novels locked-down, when they should not be).

* John L. Balderston

Berkeley Square (1929 published play, later made into a time-travel movie greatly admired by Lovecraft).

Also note O’Brien’s The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age (1929), which was a book admired by Lovecraft.

The 1929 run of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, and their contents. Note F.B. Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos”. I’m not looking at detectives in this brief survey, but I see Derleth’s first “Solar Pons” detective stories were written in 1929. Apparently they saw in print in the same year, along with the first tales of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade character.

In comics, Buck Rogers and Tintin first appeared in 1929. In cartoons, there’s Popeye the Sailor-man, and apparently the Silly Symphonies(?). Though trademark-trolls may still claim the names.

Finally, in 1929 Gernsback first gave the name ‘science fiction’ to a new literary format. The first science-fiction fanzine appeared, Cosmic Stories. The first continuous science-fiction comic strip appeared, an adaptation of a novel. The first spur for modern ‘sword & sorcery’ also appeared, Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (Kull, in Weird Tales). The anthology Beware After Dark! (1929) put Lovecraft’s horror “The Call of Cthulhu” between hardcovers, and the volume had wide popular distribution. The rest is history…