Over the past twenty years, New Years Day has become more than simply a celebration of a new beginnings, it is has come to coincide with Public Domain Day! And this year’s Public Domain Day is a particularly notable one because it finally features the arrival of Mickey Mouse (at last as he appears in the film “Steamboat Willie”) into the public domain. Since Disney has exerted an outsize influence on the shape of the public domain, in part to protect their prized property Mickey (and Minnie) Mouse, it is an important landmark indeed.

I won’t try to explain the decades of wrangling associated with the arrival of “Steamboat Willie” in the public domain because Jennifer Jenkins, the Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has done it far better than I could! Read the story here.

For the avid reader public domain day is better than Christmas. It not only marks the release of a new gaggle of works into our eager hands free from any copyright, but also (and more importantly) represents an occasion to remind us of all the wonderful writing that has appeared, but somehow slipped quietly into obscurity.

I won’t offer any heavy-handed recommendations (although you should definitely check out NDQ 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, and 19.1), but I’d be remiss not to mention W.E.B. Dubois’s, Dark Princess, Ford Madox Ford’s entire Parade’s End tetralogy (with The Last Post becoming available this year; this could be read profitably alongside Eric Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front), Edith Wharton’s The Children (with a h/t to our essay editor Sheila Liming’s socials for this!), Virginia Wolf’s Orlando, and Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall.

Remember that our literary commons are there for our enjoyment and edification. This isn’t just a quirk of copyright law or a perk of living in a litigious society, but the recognition that great (and even just mediocre) works of literature are part of our common inheritance.