A Friday Chat About ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and The Public Domain
The classic will no longer be sold as a mass-market paperback
ESTER: Hello!
NICOLE: Happy Friday! Happy almost maternity leave!
ESTER: Thank you! It is my last day of work. That means I made it!
NICOLE: I hope everything goes well for you on your leave.
ESTER: Hahahha yes, I envision lots of calming baths and massages, maybe some gardening. I’ll take up a new hobby, like knitting cozies. I’ll meditate. I’ll be so fucking self-actualized that when I come back you won’t even recognize me.
NICOLE: That sounds … horrifyingly delightful? Also unlikely.
ESTER: Yes. In actuality I will be a frazzled mess trying to figure out how to fit a newly expanded family of four into my <850 square foot apartment. But at least the weather should be pretty nice! I look forward to sitting on the front steps of my building. That is actually, seriously, as far as my imagination can take me: that maybe, if all goes well, I’ll be able to get out once in awhile and sit on my front steps.
NICOLE: That, and really really quickly order one of the few remaining mass-market copies of To Kill a Mockingbird before they stop making them.
ESTER: Yes, what is with this news? It is so bizarre! That is precisely the edition of TKaM that I read back in the day. And now “there will no longer be a mass-market version of To Kill a Mockingbird available in the United States.” On what grounds are the people in charge exhuming and desecrating the corpses of our childhoods? Isn’t it bad enough that Aaron Sorkin was tapped to the write the script of the Broadway adaptation?
NICOLE: It’s just math, right? “Hey, we have this edition of TKaM that sells for $8.99. We have this other edition that sells for $14.99. Let’s stop making the one that sells for $8.99. PROFIT!”
ESTER: I mean, sure, but if Lee herself didn’t care about the increased profit while she was alive, it seems churlish for her heirs to make this change.
NICOLE: Are any of them Millennials? Because this might be literally the only way for us to make the same amount of money previous generations made.
ESTER: Still not sympathetic, Nicole. You can’t get me that way.
NICOLE: It makes sense in terms of “everything costs slightly more today than it used to.” Which is really unfortunate. Rent and health insurance and college and textbooks and now this book that is used in so many classrooms. (I also grew up reading the mass-market paperback.) If it’s something that a lot of people use and need, someone’s going to eventually start charging more for it.
ESTER: But that’s the opposite of how the logic should go! Besides, we want to encourage reading, especially accessible and also deeply lovely and thoughtful books like Mockingbird; if anything we should be subsidizing them, not taking away the discount of a few bucks that a kid can get on this, or Gatsby, or Grapes of Wrath. And I say that knowing that bookstores are having a hard time: consider this piece about how Barnes & Noble is “only” closing a handful of stores and that’s considered something of a success. It’s also making more of its money by selling adult coloring books, toys, and other ephemera.
NICOLE: I haven’t ever gotten into adult coloring books because coloring hurts my wrists (I’ve never enjoyed it) but I know a lot of people who really like them. And I suspect the mass-market TKaM will have a very long half-life on Ebay and the other resale sites, right? Or is someone going to create a new “classroom edition” with five pages of discussion questions and exercises in the back, and everyone will have to buy that one?
ESTER: Ugh, I hope not. Do you remember whether you had to buy your own books for English class? I guess I probably had to but I don’t recall. I got a bunch handed down to me from my older brother, and I handed them down to my little brother in turn, which implies that they must have belonged to my family. But basically what Lee’s estate is saying is that they’re totally cool with adding to the cost-burden of the average struggling American family, and I resent that. Can’t they enjoy their ill-gotten gains from the publication of Go Set A Watchman and that upcoming Sorkin-penned Broadway production and be satisfied?
NICOLE: I can’t remember if I had to buy books for high school English, but I don’t think I did. We read TKaM, Great Expectations, and The Scarlet Letter. I think we may have also read a photocopied version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
ESTER: Photocopied?? That raises another interesting question though: when does the copyright pass into the public domain? Ever?
NICOLE: I am not up on contemporary copyright law, but didn’t Disney ruin everything? Something like “copyrights don’t expire the way they used to?” Also, we read multiple photocopied books in school, and not all of them were public-domain Shakespeare.
ESTER: Um, that’s weird. But okay. Here’s an answer from Google, via Teaching Copyright:
In general, works published after 1977 will not fall into the public domain until 70 years after the death of author, or, for corporate works, anonymous works, or works for hire, 95 years from the date of publication or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever expires first.
So, “life of the author plus 70 years.” Oh wow. Yeah. So there’s a ways to go.
NICOLE: Well, Disney keeps moving the goalposts every time their stuff gets close to falling into public domain, so it might someday be “life of the author plus 150 years,” and so on.
ESTER: Also I just found this, about copyright and TKaM:
To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Under the earliest US copyright law, which had a term of 14 years, it would have gone into the public domain in 1974 unless Lee took steps to renew that copyright for another 14 years — something she would have been able to do just once. That would have allowed it to stay in copyright until 1988. In other words, even had its copyright been renewed, To Kill a Mockingbird would now have been in the public domain for more than a quarter of a century.
Instead, it’s remained in copyright (and will remain so for at least another 70 years). So royalties have continued to flow. It’s perhaps largely for this reason that Harper Lee never got around to completing another book — Mockingbird became her meal-ticket for life. In short, in this case copyright law did the exact opposite of what it was intended for: it removed the incentive to create more works.
NICOLE: Yeah, not holding out hope that a lot of newer stuff will ever make it into public domain.
ESTER: On the plus side, “All works published in the U.S. before 1923” are already there!
NICOLE: I spent so much time reading public domain books on Project Gutenberg when I was strapped for cash during the college and grad school years. That’s how I was introduced to Katherine Mansfield and Don Marquis, for example. There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there! Also a lot of garbage. Just like today!
ESTER: Totally. I enjoy browsing through and finding “classics” — i.e., old books that may once have been good, though who knows. The only thing you can be sure of is that 1) they’re old and 2) someone somewhere thought they were worth digitizing. I have a bunch of them on my e-reader, like Alice Adams and The Jungle, for if I’m ever desperate and caught without something newer, and I don’t feel like rereading the Hunger Games for the nth time.
NICOLE: I have Bleak House on mine, and I keep trying to read it (again, when I don’t have anything else), and I keep getting about five pages in before I start falling asleep. Which is disappointing because I loved the miniseries and because it makes me feel like a person who just can’t appreciate one of the great novels of our time.
ESTER: Hee! It’s from like 1850, Nicole. Not exactly “our time.” I have a paperback of it on my bookshelf — quite possibly a mass-market edition — and I’ve gotten about five pages in myself. We’ll never know how Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce turns out!
NICOLE: Maybe you can finish it over your maternity leave, Ester. Since you won’t have anything else to do.
ESTER: I will 100% report back on that, thank you. ❤
