IV. 1909 — present
Whereas the 1870 law represented a change in administrative
procedure rather than in definition of the term of copyright, the act of 4
March 1909 (35 Stat. 1075, effective 1 July 1909) made fundamental
changes in the procedures required for securing copyright, the first such
changes since the original law of 1790. From 1790 to 1909, the term of
copyright had dated from the deposit of a printed title page prior to
publication, in order to protect a work during the course of publication; the
1909 statute eliminated entirely the necessity of registering title pages in
advance of publication and designated the term of copyright to begin with
the date of publication. (The term was still 28 years, but renewable for
another 28, rather than 14 — without inserting a notice in a
newspaper.)
Henceforth the "copyright date," by legal definition, was to be synonymous
with the publication date; and as a result bibliographers have at their
fingertips, in the copyright records and the published
Catalogue, the official publication dates of all copyrighted
works for which registration has been made in the United States since the
middle of 1909. To be sure, the actual publication date (or date of release
to the general public) may in some cases be different; but deciding what
constitutes an "actual publication date" is an arbitrary matter anyway, and
the fact remains that the date in the copyright records is the one reported
by the publisher (or author, or whoever was the copyright proprietor) as the
publication date (and therefore the date on which he wished his copyright
protection to begin). So, in the post-1909 records, there are no title
registration dates and no collection of title pages, but only the dates of
publication — and, as before, the dates of deposit of two copies,
important for the bibliographer as proof that physical copies of the books
existed on those dates.
The other most important feature of the 1909 law, from the
bibliographer's point of view, has to do with the requirement of American
manufacture, initiated in the 1891 act. Whatever its merits (or demerits)
from other points of view, it became a great boon to the bibliographer in
1909, for the new statute required, as part of each application for copyright,
an affidavit giving the names of the printer and binder and the date of the
completion of printing. Since the printer was not obliged, as in England, to
place his name on the printed matter itself,[34] this manufacturing information for
American books is
usually not elsewhere available, unless the printers' or publishers' files exist
and are accessible. Descriptive bibliographers generally record the names
of printers when they are provided in a colophon or printer's imprint and
sometimes go to elaborate lengths to consult publishers' records. While
there is no doubt that publishers' records are valuable (in furnishing facts
about sizes and dates of impressions, for example), the point here is that
those records are not the most convenient source for the names of the
printers and binders of all copyrighted American books after 1909. The
copyright records, open to public inspection, contain them, and often in
addition the officially sworn date of the completion of printing for each
book (but the presence of this date depends on the form of affidavit in use
at any given time). One can easily discover that Henry James's
Gabrielle de Bergerac was printed and bound by J. J. Little
and
Ives (completed on 12 November 1918) and that
Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio was printed by the
Van
Rees Press (finished 28 April 1919) and bound by the H. Wolff Estate
—
information not provided in the standard bibliographies of these
authors.
One other provision of the 1909 law will serve to suggest the
bibliographical usefulness of twentieth-century American copyright records
even for students of English and foreign literatures. Sections 21 and 22 of
the act provided for "ad interim copyrights" of works in the English
language first published abroad. Depositing one copy of any such work in
the Copyright Office within thirty days after publication would secure to the
author (or proprietor) an American copyright to last for a period of thirty
days; if during that period the author (or proprietor) arranged to have an
American edition of the work printed and deposited, he could secure a
regular 28-year copyright. Although the lengths of these periods have varied
in the years since 1909, the application for an ad interim copyright has
always necessitated a statement of the original date of publication of the
foreign edition; the ad interim record books (which begin with 16 July
1909) therefore contain the English
publication dates of a great many works of twentieth-century English
literature. The works entered naturally represent only an erratic sampling
of all English books published (amounting to something more than 29,000
entries by the end of 1945); but for the works included, this source of
information about publication dates is frequently a more convenient and
accessible one than any which exists in England. From the ad interim
record books one can learn that Norman Douglas's South
Wind
was published on 5 June 1917 and D. H. Lawrence's Pansies
on 4 July 1929, facts which are not recorded in the standard Soho
bibliographies of these authors. A similar statutory
arrangement in regard to works first published abroad in a language other
than English had existed from 3 March 1905 (33 Stat. 1000) until 1 July
1909, when a provision went into effect, as a part of the general revision
of that year, specifying that a full-term copyright could be secured for
works of foreign origin in a language other than English whether or not
such works or translations of them were manufactured in the United States;
the resulting "Class A Foreign" record books contain the original
publication dates for a large number of foreign works (over 3000 entries
between 22 March 1905 and 1 July 1909, and over 85,000 more by
1945).
The copyright records for the post-1909 period are not strikingly
different from those for the preceding period, except for the kinds of dates
they include, but certain points about them are worth noting:
(1) Record Books and Card Indexes. During the years
from 1870 to 1909 both the record books and the card indexes contained
information that had been transcribed from the claimants' original
applications (which were then tied into bundles and are now stored in
Alexandria). From 1909 on, the actual application forms were brought
together to constitute these records, first as the card index and later as the
record books. On 1 July 1909 a card form of application was introduced;
each card (for books), when folded once, was the size of the proprietor
cards which had been filed since 1898 and could be interfiled with them.
These card applications continued in use for books until early March 1948
(for other classes the date varied between 1946 and 1948); they were filed
alphabetically by claimants through 6 November 1937 and by registration
number thereafter. Thus between 1909 and 1937 the claimant cards in the
card index are the actual applications, not transcriptions of them;
between 1937 and 1946 the card index may be used to supply registration
numbers, which are then checked in the separate application card file. The
publication date, the date of receipt of deposit copies, the date of the
affidavit of American manufacture, and the XXc registration number are
visible on each card without unfolding it; to learn the names of the printer
and binder and the date of completion of printing, one must unfold the card
(which of course necessitates pulling the rod from the card drawer). The
record books for this period are correspondingly less useful, for three
reasons: the entries in them are arranged by registration number, so that
one must first ascertain the number in the card index anyway (or in the
published catalogue); they contain no information not on the application
cards (except, in some cases, that taken from the book itself); they are
transcriptions, not original documents. From 1909 to late 1940 (for books)
these
record books contain handwritten entries on large pages; from October 1940
through early 1946 they consist of carbon copies of the certificates of
copyright registration sent to claimants.
Beginning with May 1946 (for books) a new page form of application
came into use (although the old card form continued to be accepted until
early 1948, so that original applications for book registrations during these
years may be found either in the application card file or in the record
books). The new applications were simply bound together in registration
number sequence (thus in the approximate order of receipt) to constitute the
record books. But after May 1946 the relationship between the record books
and the card indexes is reversed, since the cards for the card indexes again
became transcriptions of information contained in both the works and the
applications. One must use the card index (or published catalogues) to
ascertain the registration number; but if one wishes to check the application
itself, one must look up the number in the record books. Though all the
record books are official documents and the published catalogues prima
facie evidence of the information they
contain (by the law of 1909), historical scholars are always alert to the
possibility of mistranscription and will find 1946 and 1948 the most
important dates to remember in using the records, since that two-year
period forms the dividing line between original applications as cards in
drawers and original applications as pages in record books.[35]
In addition to these basic indexes and record books, the Copyright
Office contains a number of other files and records, some of which should
be mentioned for their potential bibliographical usefulness. (a) The
assignment card indexes, with entries under assignor, assignee, and (from
1927) titles, serve as a guide to the series of assignment record books; both
the indexes and the record books provide information about the transfer of
titles and are an essential source for publishing history and for
author-bibliographies that take later editions and impressions into account.
(b) The renewal record books (a separate series after 1909, with their own
XXc numbers) are indexed (by claimants, authors, and some titles) in
separate card indexes between 1909 and 1937, and in the general card
indexes thereafter; whenever a renewal card for a given book is not present,
one should check the original registration number in the appropriate record
book, for the
renewal registration numbers have consistently (since 1898) been posted at
the point of original entry in the record books. (c) The pseudonym card file
consists of twenty drawers covering the years before 1938 and forms a
useful supplement to the record of pseudonyms in the Library of Congress
catalogues of printed cards. (d) The "bio-biblio" file of material in vertical
folders contains many bibliographical lists which have resulted from
previous searches and dust jackets which include biographical information.
(e) The correspondence and remitter indexes contain summaries of
copyright correspondence and names of the actual remitters of copyright
fees; these indexes, not open to public inspection, contain little of
bibliographical significance but could occasionally furnish details for
biographical studies of authors or publishers. Correspondence directly
relating to completed registrations is, however, available for public
inspection and copying if the request identifies the work
either by registration number or in sufficient detail to allow the registration
to be found.
(2) Deposit Copies. Because of limitations of space, the
Copyright Office in the twentieth century has employed the policy of
keeping deposits only for a limited time (normally three or five years) and
then transferring them to the Library of Congress for disposal, with the
result that there is no complete set of copyright deposits in existence. The
only exceptions are certain categories of unpublished materials, particularly
music and drama; since unpublished typescripts of plays are accepted for
copyright, it was felt that all the typescripts should be retained. These
plays, dating from the creation of Class D in 1901, are now housed in the
Library of Congress (where they form a largely untapped body of material
for the history of American drama and a substantially neglected source of
unpublished titles for bibliographies of American dramatists).[36] The general policy of disposing of
deposits was changed in 1959, however, and from that date
forward single copies of deposits were to be kept by the Copyright Office
as a permanent record (except those that were transferred to the stacks of
the Library of Congress). The only deposits, therefore, which are available
for examination in the Copyright Office are those from 1959 to the present
(they can be recalled, upon request, from storage in Alexandria).
The point of interest in this situation is the whereabouts of the earlier
deposit copies. Even though a deposit copy may not always
represent the earliest form of a book in every respect, it is an interesting
bibliographical object simply by virtue of its being an official copy of
record. Since the Copyright Office stamps deposits as they are received,
deposit copies can almost always be identified; the question is where to look
for them. The Library of Congress has on its shelves most of the kinds of
deposits with which bibliographers are concerned: in some cases it has both
deposit copies, in other cases only one copy, and sometimes neither one.
Copies which the Library does not choose for its permanent collections are
available to other governmental libraries and to other institutions, according
to a general scheme of priorities established by the Exchange and Gift
Division of the Library. The result is that copyright deposit copies can turn
up any-where, even in secondhand book stores. Obviously such scattered
copies are of no value for general reference because one would never know
where to look for any
particular work. But large or regular transfers of deposits are worth
knowing about, since the receiving institutions became in effect small
depository libraries for given fields or periods. One of the most important
of these arrangements provided for the transfer to the library of Brown
University, over a period of nearly thirty years, one of the two deposit
copies of every volume of American poetry and drama copyrighted during
that time; between 1909 and 1922 alone this transfer amounted to 15,556
volumes.
[37] The excellent collection
of poetry at Brown thus gains an added dimension as a place where deposit
copies can often be found, and it is possible that deposit copies exist there
for works no longer present (at least in the form of the original deposit
copy) on the shelves of the Library of Congress. Other similar
arrangements have prevailed at various periods — certain scientific
books
were regularly sent to the John Crerar Library, children's
books to the University of Illinois, and foreign books to the District of
Columbia Public Library; during the first world war many thousands of
deposits went to the War Service Library; and in 1930 over 1300 city
directories were transferred to the American Antiquarian Society. A
complete list of such mass transfers would perhaps be impossible to
compile, but bibliographers should at least realize that the Library of
Congress is not the only place where deposit copies may be
examined.
[38]
(3) Published Records. The published Catalogue
of
Copyright Entries (spelled "Catalog" as of 1934) extends throughout
this period, and the entire copyright record is available in any good
research library. Before 1909 part of the record was excluded from the
printed version, since only deposited works were included and not
registered titles for which no completed works had been deposited. After
1909, when title registrations were abolished, the record of deposits became
at the same time a complete record of copyright entries. It is as simple a
matter to look up the publication date, deposit date, or affidavit date for any
work copyrighted in the United States since 1909 in the CCE
as it is to look the work up in the CBI or the Library of
Congress catalogue or any other standard source; why the
CCE
is used so infrequently by bibliographers is a mystery. From a
bibliographical point of view, the only weakness of the CCE
is
that it does not
include the names of the printer and binder of each book, nor the date of
completion of printing; this information can be found only in the
applications filed in the Copyright Office. Everything else is found in the
printed record, including the claimant's name and the registration
number.
In the second series of CCE (1906-46), bibliographers
will generally need to refer only to Part I (Books) and Part II (Periodicals).
Beginning with 1909, however, pamphlet and dramatic material was
designated as Group 2 of Part I, listed in separate volumes with separate
annual indexes; since some works could be classified either way, it is
generally wise to check the annual indexes for both Groups 1 and 2. A
Group 3, for dramatic compositions, was added in 1928; again, published
drama could appear in Groups 1, 2, or 3, and all are worth checking. The
annual indexes, by claimant and author, are excellent through 1938, but
from 1939 through 1946 they contain only the names of authors, not of
claimants, making the CCE less useful during this period for
work on publishing history.[39] The
war also necessitated certain abbreviations in the scope of each entry: from
1938 through 1945 some of the information available on Library of
Congress
cards (such as the total pagination) was eliminated, and from 1940 through
1946 the publication date alone (and not the deposit date) was given. In the
third series of CCE (1947- ), bibliographers may be
interested in Parts 1A (Books), 1B (Pamphlets and Contributions to
Periodicals), 2 (Periodicals), 3/4 (Drama and Works for Oral Delivery),
and possibly 5 (Music) and 6 (Maps and
Atlases). The entries for Part 1 are now arranged alphabetically by authors,
obviating an author index, but with two alphabets per year (since there are
two semi-annual issues); not until 1951 and 1952 are there claimant
indexes, and beginning with 1953 there are cross references, in the same
alphabet, from the names of claimants. Only publication dates and
registration numbers are given in the third series. Despite a few deficiencies
between 1938 and 1951, the
CCE is a remarkable work of
reference that can serve many bibliographical uses for which it was not
originally designed.
[40] Bibliographers
working in the period after 1909 will find that the American copyright
records contain more information of the kind they are seeking than has been
preserved in the official records of any other nation.
