Authors who entered the public domain in 2012

[dii]

I don't know if it's been discussed before somewhere else, but I thought I'd share, maybe somebody finds something interesting to read

http://www.publicdomainday.org/node/44/

[Hokuspokus]

Thank you, dii.

Some prominent names are on the list this year:
James Joyce
Rabindranath Tagore
Virginia Woolf

Not on the list but maybe nice to know for German readers - Edgar Wallace translations are pd now, too. The stories are quite different from the famous b/w movies.
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/autor/1009

[Piotrek]

Not an author (at least not in the first place), but a very prolific translator of French literature into Polish- Taduesz "Boy" Żeleński- died in 1941, which means that his translations are now PD Now, the only obstacle is to find some old enough editions...

[Hokuspokus]

Old edition is not so important. You only need to make sure that the text is not different from the original.
In German the keywords would be "überarbeitet" and "durchgesehen". No idea what that would be in English. (Not over worked or looked through)

[Viktor]

I think that would be a "revised edition", or anything that contains another editor, that you want to avoid.

[Piotrek]

From time to time I see "revised edition" notes in books I read, but so far I haven't paid much attention to it. I have no idea if the publishers in Poland are obliged by law to state what edition the work is based on. Thus, I have no idea what to assume when I find no such info.

[Piotrek]

Not an author (at least not in the first place), but a very prolific translator of French literature into Polish- Taduesz "Boy" Żeleński- died in 1941, which means that his translations are now PD Now, the only obstacle is to find some old enough editions...

It turns out that wolnelektury.pl has e-texts of some of Żeleński's works (both translations and original works) taken from original editions published in 1930s. I was thinking specifically about 2 non-fiction books: one of them is a literary monography devoted to a rather little-known (and somewhat embarassing) episode in the life of Poland's most celebrated poet. The other is a historical study presenting the history of one of Poland's most famous love-stories, namely that between a Polish king Jan Sobieski (ever heard about the battle of Vienna 1683? he was a commander of the anti-Turkish coalition there) and his French life-long love and, later, queen of Poland. I've only read a few chapters from each of these books and it looks that each of them has its problems, though The first contains EPIC amounts of quotations and quite some footnotes, while the other has lots of footnotes and, predictably, much French...