Happy Public Domain Day 2026

The calendar turns, and once again a lively procession of books, images, films, and music leaves copyright behind and steps into the ever-growing public domain! On this year's Public Domain Day (which falls each January 1st) we welcome, in lots of countries around the world, the words of Wallace Stevens, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein, and in the US a bevy of brilliant books including William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, and, in their original German, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund.

Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three main types of copyright term for historical works which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are:

Some of you may have been following our advent-style countdown calendar which revealed day-by-day through December our highlights for these new public domain entrants. The last window was opened yesterday, and while such a format was fun for the slow reveal, for the sake of a good gorgeable list we’ve exploded the calendar out into a digestible array below. Enjoy!

Entering the public domain in the US

William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying is a Southern Gothic novel by American author William Faulkner, consistently ranked among the best novels of the 20th century. The title is derived from William Marris’s 1925 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, referring to the similar themes of both works.

Read on Faded Page and Standard Books

Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons

Swallows and Amazons is a children’s adventure novel by English author Arthur Ransome. It is the first book in the Swallows and Amazons series, followed by Swallowdale.

Read on Faded Page and Standard Books

Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter

Not Without Laughter* is the debut novel of Langston Hughes, the American writer, activist, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Read on Faded Page and Standard Books

Hermann Hesse – Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund (in German, Narziß und Goldmund), also published in English as Death and the Lover, is a novel written by the German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. At its publication, it was considered Hesse’s literary triumph.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film)

All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 American pre-Code epic anti-war film based on the 1929 novel of the same name by German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Directed by Lewis Milestone, it stars Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville, and William Bakewell.

Read on Faded Page

Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies

Vile Bodies is the second novel by Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books, and a prolific journalist and book reviewer. It satirises London’s post–First World War “bright young things” — a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in London — and the press coverage around them. Waugh originally considered the title Bright Young Things but changed it; the published title echoes a narrator’s remark on crowds and parties: “Those vile bodies”.

Read on Faded Page and Standard Books

Margaret Ayer Barnes - Years of Grace

Years of Grace is the first book by the American playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Margaret Ayer Barnes. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1931.

Read free ebook through Standard Books

Hellbound Train

Hell-Bound Train is a 1930 film written and directed by James and Eloyce Gist. A self-taught husband-and-wife team with a shared religious mission, they produced at least three silent films for African American church audiences, touring them across the United States. Shown alongside sermons, these works used cinema as a vehicle for evangelism. In Hell-Bound Train — which Eloyce is said to have rewritten, re-edited, and partly refilmed after James’s initial version — the viewer passes from carriage to carriage as the filmmakers stage various “Jazz Age” sins, including dancing, drinking, and gambling, all overseen by a mischievous devil conductor. Though Hell-Bound Train has gained some renewed attention via Kino Lorber’s Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set and a brief run on the Criterion Channel, this film — one of the few surviving silent works by an African American woman — is still often absent from retrospectives on early women filmmakers, perhaps because of its modest production values and overtly moralizing tone. (Wikipedia)

Watch on YouTube

Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (in German Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil, published in parts from 1930 to 1943.

Read German original on Project Gutenberg

T. S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is a long poem written by T. S. Eliot during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, the poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.

Read on English Verse and Standard Books

Agatha Christie - The Murder at the Vicarage

The Murder at the Vicarage is a work of detective fiction by the British writer Agatha Christie. It is the first novel to feature the character of Miss Marple and her village of St Mary Mead (characters that had previously appeared in short stories).

Read free ebook through Standard Books

Franz Kafka - The Castle (english translation)

The Castle (in German, *Das Schloss*) is a 1926 novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as “K.” arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest. Kafka died before he could finish the work, but suggested it would end with K. dying in the village, the castle notifying him on his death bed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there.” Dark and at times surreal, *The Castle* is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal. (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books

Stella Benson - The Far-Away Bride

The Far-Away Bride is the most famous book by the English feminist, novelist, poet, and travel writer Stella Benson. It was published in the United States first in 1930 and as Tobit Transplanted in Britain in 1931. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for English writers in 1932.

Vladimir Nabokov - The Defense

The Defense (in Russian, Zashchita Luzhinais) is the third novel written by Vladimir Nabokov after he had emigrated to Berlin. It appeared first under Nabokov’s pen name V. Sirin in the Russian émigré quarterly Sovremennye zapiski and was thereafter published by the émigré publishing house Slovo as The Luzhin Defense in Berlin.

Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story is told entirely in external third-person narrative; there is no description whatsoever of any character’s thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look. The novel has been adapted several times for the cinema and is considered part of the hardboiled genre, which Hammett played a major part in popularizing.

Read on Faded Page and Standard Books

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Insatiability

Insatiability (in Polish Nienasycenie) is a speculative fiction novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). It is Witkiewicz’s third novel, considered by some to be his best.

Read more about Witkiewicz’s artworks in our essay “Documenting Drugs” by Juliette Bretan

Entering the public domain in countries with a ‘life plus 70 year’ copyright term

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc^2, which arises from special relativity, has been called “the world’s most famous equation”. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for “his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”.

Works at Wikisource

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Charlie Parker

Charles Parker Jr. was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. He was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Parker primarily played the alto saxophone.

Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Works at Project Gutenberg

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit, Catholic priest, scientist, paleontologist, philosopher, mystic, and teacher. He investigated the theory of evolution from a perspective influenced by Henri Bergson and Christian mysticism, writing multiple scientific and religious works on the subject, his most popular being The Phenomenon of Man, published posthumously in 1955. His mainstream scientific achievements include his palaeontological research in China, taking part in the discovery of the significant Peking Man fossils from the Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing. His more speculative ideas, sometimes criticized as pseudoscientific, have included a vitalist conception of the Omega Point. Along with Vladimir Vernadsky, he contributed to the development of the concept of the noosphere.

Roger Mais

Roger Mais was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.

Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto was a Pakistani writer, playwright and novelist from Punjab, who is regarded as the greatest short-story author in Urdu literature. He was active from 1933 during British rule till his death in 1955 after independence.

Entering the public domain in countries with a ‘life plus 50 year’ copyright term

Barbara Hepworth

Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Hepworth studied at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. She married the sculptor John Skeaping in 1925. In 1931 she fell in love with the painter Ben Nicholson, and in 1933 divorced Skeaping. At this time she was part of a circle of modern artists centred on Hampstead, London, and was one of the founders of the art movement Unit One. At the beginning of the Second World War Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Best known as a sculptor, Hepworth also produced drawings – including a series of sketches of operating rooms following the hospitalisation of her daughter in 1944 – and lithographs. She died in a fire at her studio in 1975. (Wikipedia)

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Evans’ published his first photos at the age of 27. Much of Evans’ New Deal work uses the large format, 8 × 10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.

Works at Library of Congress