PG can give you a blanket clearance for all of a periodical from before 1923 (that is, 1922 and earlier). As bowerbird points out, you will be acting as editor and compiler which is enough creative effort, in the US at least, to allow you to claim a new copyright, if you choose to. I believe that there are other compilations already in PG that are similar to what you are proposing. Modern readers are interested in a surprisingly huge range of material. Advertising material can be, ah, exciting, to format. But if you are willing to do the work to include at least some of the other material (and to note what you left out), you could also prepare each Desk Almanac as a separate PG project. No issues with copyright on that as far as I know. JulietS Dave Fawthrop wrote:
One of ?my? Authors, John Hartley, wrote some 1000 short pieces of poetry and prose only about 1/2 were published in books, some of which book are already on PG. The rest were published in the Clock Almanack, Penney Broadsheets, dated up to 1915,and the like. All out of Copyright to both US and EU, life+70 systems.
The Almanacks were sort of Desk Calendars, which along with the dialect works had *many* pages of adverts, "A Chronological Table of the Principal Events in Yorkshire History, Changes of the moon, Festivals ... Original puns and conundrums, etc", Rambling Remarks, etc. which IMO will no longer be of interest to the modern reader. All the above were always omitted from books which were compiled from works in the Clock Almanacks
I would hope at some time to collect those short works into groups of about 50 for PG. This would involve me, as editor, in choosing/collecting/assembling the works from various sources. Working title would be "Lost Works of John Hartley", or "John Hartley's unrepublished Works from the Clock Almanacks ???? to ????", It would clearly be a good idea to state in which dated copy of Clock Almanack each work could be found. It should take two to five Clock Almanacks to make a PG book.
As PG is set up for whole books this would leave a problem with copyright clearance. I have copies of the Contents Page for each yearly Almanack which would clear OK, but any subsequent book edited by me would cause problems, because it would contain work from more than one source.
Any ideas?