Important information
The condition of use of this website is that you do not rely on any of the information in it without checking it to your satisfaction.
The information is provided in good faith,
but sometimes errors exist in the sources, or are introduced in transcriptions or understanding,
eg: some of the ‘book’ titles may actually be pamphlets or learned journal articles;
the dates for plays are often those for the first performance,
which may be significantly different from the formal publication date;
and for many other books there can be a small uncertainty in the publication year.
For some authors, an attempt has been made to indicate by the use of parentheses which of their full set of names were used as a byline,
but different forms occur in different places, the sources don't always make clear what was used,
and it's too time-consuming to check all of them. So don't place much importance on this parenthesising.
About this website
The aim of this site is to catalog all deceased authors,
all authors of books published before 1964, and at least some more recent authors,
including their full name(s), date & place of death, date & place of birth, pseudonyms, gender &
nationality (not nationality for those who died before 1920), and their books published before 1964.
The purpose of this site is:
- by cataloging the dates of death of authors,
to enable the determination of the expiry of their copyright where a “life + x years” rule applies.
Where the date of death is unavailable, the date of birth or date of their first publication
can be used to set an upper limit to the duration of copyright.
- by cataloging the dates of publication of books, to enable the determination of the expiry of their copyright
where a “publication + x years” rule applies. In the US, for works published in 1928
thru 1963 the copyright status also depends on whether the initial copyright was renewed –
see the Catalog of Copyright Entries (Renewals) webpage for guidance on this.
- to identify those books already available on the Internet,
to help online readers and avoid unnecessary duplication of effort by “electronic republishers”.
Note that therefore only some of the authors and books listed here will be out of copyright, some will still be in copyright.
Status: The catalog currently contains about 198 000 authors out of at least 500 000 deceased authors,
and over 680 000 (40 000 of them online) out of at least 2 500 000 books published before 1964.
Of these authors, about 36 500 (18%) are female.
Credits: Thanks for their assistance to John Herrington, John Holmstrom, Allen J Hubin, Troy Bassett
and countless others who have provided information on themselves, their relations and other authors of interest to them.
Abbreviations, etc
- Women's maiden (nee) and sequence of married (1:Mrs, etc) names are identified thus, where known.
- ‘c__’ means ‘circa __’ or about.
Dates: The date of first publication in book form is usually given;
for works first published in a periodical, that date is also included, in parentheses ( );
multiple dates separated by slashes (/) indicate revised editions;
a dash (-) indicates that publication was spread over that period.