It still surprises me even to this day that one of the most popular posts on the Public Domain Treasure Hunter Blog is a post we did almost two years ago about L. Frank Baum and his “Oz” series of children’s books!

I mean, I love this stuff – but I never would have thought that so many other people all over the world would be as fascinated by these books as I am.

In honor of those Public Domain Treasure Hunters out there that have a fondness for all things Oz, we’ve revamped and updated the original post to include links to the online versions of the original books so you can check them out in greater detail or even use them in the creation of your own products.

If you’re interested, here’s the link to the original (new and improved for 2010) post…

Follow The Yellow Brick Road Through The Public Domain…

Here’s to you Dorothy!

Logan Andrew

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Library of Congress Performing
Arts Poster Collection

Here’s another great Public Domain resource from the Library of Congress…

This collection features hundreds of truly amazing turn of the century performing arts posters featuring magicians, psychics, plays, comedies, and a wide variety of shows and events available as high-resolution, archival quality downloads.

If you’ve ever wanted to start a business reprinting Public Domain posters here’s a great opportunity to get started!

Here’s a few samples straight from the collection…

There’s a ton of cool stuff in here.

My favorites are the old magician posters ~ I’m a sucker for anything to do with magic and the occult, especially the old stuff!

Here’s the link to the Performing Arts Poster Collection at the Library of Congress…

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/p?pp/var:@field(COLLID%20var)::SortBy=CALL

Have Fun!

P.S. – What are your favorite posters in this collection? Do you have ideas on how these posters can be used to create awesome new products?

Leave a comment below and let’s discuss it!

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Creating an Audio CD in 11 Easy Steps…

This week, my friend Erin and I had a brief discussion about how to use Public Domain materials to create audio CD’s…

Erin asked a great question…

I think my local market would be ripe for some Old Time Radio shows and I was wondering … do I simply download the mp3 files of the radio show then run it through itunes to create and audio cd that will play on any cd player (rather than a computer?).

To which some well-meaning yet somewhat dim-witted fellow (me) replied…

This is a great question and I love the idea. Old Time Radio shows are a personal favorite of mine and I love projects that involve them.

With regards to downloading mp3 files and than using them to create cd’s that will play on any standard cd player (as opposed to offering them in MP3 format)…

I’m not sure about iTunes. I usually use Roxio Easy Media Creator for that sort of thing. I know many of our readers use a simple program called CDBurnerXP.

It does a great job of creating standard audio cd’s from mp3’s and it’s very simple to use – just import your mp3 tracks and burn after telling the program you want to create an audio cd.

I think I’ll do a tutorial on this subject for this week’s PDTH update.

I don’t think we’ve ever really covered this particular topic in detail before so here goes…

We’re going to create a “Master CD” of our new audio product.

To do the job, we’re going to download a free copy of CDBurnerXP (that way nobody has an excuse for not doing this) and we’re going to use it to burn our Master copy of an audio CD…

1) Download your free copy of CDBurnerXP at the link below…

Download Instructions: Right-Click the link below and select either “save target as” or “save link as” depending on what browser you are using.

Right Click Here To Download “CDBurnerXP” Now…

2) Install the program on your machine (sorry, Windows only).

3) Crank up the CDBurnerXP application and double-click on the “Audio Disc” selection as shown below…

4) You’ll be shown the contents of your computer in the top half of the screen – drill down to the location of your file(s) as shown below.

In this example I am going to create an audio CD product using a Public Domain recording of “War of the Worlds” that I downloaded…

5) On the bottom half of the screen, is an area in which we can build the track list for the CD we are about to create.

You can either drag and drop your “tracks” from the top half to the bottom half of the screen, or you can click on your chosen track(s) in the top half of the screen, and then click the “Add” button – 6 of one, half dozen of the other.

In my example here, we’re only creating an audio CD with a single track, so with one click we have our track list constructed.

Now for the SUPER-DUPER hard part, we may have to practice this part over and over again until we get it right…

Ready?

6) Click…“Burn”!

7) We see the next dialogue box asking if we want to “Add a pause between each track” or “Let me choose advanced settings”…

Since we’re only doing a single track recording, this question is a somewhat mute point however this question is here for a good reason…

Let’s say that we are creating a CD that contains a dozen different music tracks – in this case, I would definitely want a pause between each track so that all of the songs don’t run together – just makes sense right?

In this case I would choose, “Add a pause between each track”.

Now let’s say I broke down this large MP3 file I’m working with into several smaller tracks using an editor like Audacity (to make it possible for the listener to skip around between sections of the recording as opposed to just having one large track) – in a case like that I wouldn’t want a pause between each track, I would rather have the recording “flow” seamlessly between tracks as if it were one continuous recording.

In that case I would choose, “Let me choose advanced settings”.

8. With either choice, processing begins…

9) Then you’ll come to this screen…

A few options on the screen above you’ll want to make note of…

1. when recording your “Master” CD, it’s often best to burn at a lower rate ensuring a more stable burn
2. always make sure that sure that the “Finalize disc” option is checked or your final production WILL NOT play in a standard CD player
3. it’s best in my experience to stay with the default “Track at Once” option

10) Now, simply click on “Burn disc” as shown above to begin the actual recording process…

11) And, a short while later, you’ll see the screen below indicating that your new audio disc has been successfully burned…

If you look at the contents of your CD on your computer you’ll see something similar to the screen shot below. Right now we only have one track of course but notice that the track ends in a .cda extension just like you would find if you popped a regular retail machine-pressed audio CD in your drive…

To finish up, testing your new audio CD in an actual standard CD player is always recommended.

I just created a new product in less than 5 minutes – and like my 8 year daughter would say, “It’s easy-cheesy, like Velveeta!”

Now, you can either take this Master CD and upload it to Kunaki for distribution or you can use it to make duplicate copies yourself every time you sell one.

If you are taking the Kunaki route, you shouldn’t have any issues.

If you are going to duplicate the discs yourself to keep the costs down, make sure you always use high-quality CD-R’s for burning (not CD-RW’s) and just realize that there are older CD players (stand-alone cd players and car CD players) out there that will not read a computer burned disc no matter what you do – as long as you are prepared for that fact (in terms of potential refunds), there’s nothing wrong with duplicating audio CD’s yourself until you can make the shift to outsourcing production.

So, how many new audio CD products can YOU create this afternoon?

P.S. – If you need help with the CDBurnerXP tool, you can find it HERE.

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Library of Congress American Memory Baseball Cards 1887-1914 Collection 

Would you believe that a mint condition version of this Honus Wagner baseball card (produced in 1909 by the American Tobacco Company) sold in 2007 for a record 2.8 million dollars?

Would you believe that just six months before that it was sold for a then record-breaking $2.35 million? Read more at the link below…

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3007893

Wow! Granted, baseball cards like this are hard to come by anymore especially in perfect mint condition but still, good grief…

There’s good money in republishing material from the history of sports of all kinds but what I wanted to share with you today is the Library of Congress Baseball Cards 1887 -1914 Collection which is part of the “American Memory” series.

While you won’t find this Honus Wagner card in the LOC’s collection (at least I haven’t yet) you will find a pile of others, roughly 2100 cards in fact.

Here’s just a small sampling of what you’ll find in this online collection….

       

Getting any ideas for using these in product creations yet?

Just one example of a company making money reprinting the Honus Wagner card among others can be found at the link below…

http://www.homeruncards.com/rookiecards/honus-wagner-1909-card.shtml

You can access the Library of Congress Baseball Cards 1887 -1914 Collection at the link below…

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bbhtml/bbhome.html

Knock one out of the park for me!

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If you’re in to republishing Public Domain fiction, the “pulp mags” of the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s can provide you with a HUGE untapped treasure chest of fictional short stories to reintroduce to the world.

You could literally create a publishing company solely dedicated to the republishing of pulp magazine short stories and never have to worry about running out of content!

Pulp Fiction covers a WIDE variety of genres as well, so no matter what you’re fictional preferences are, you’re likely to find a genre that you can enjoy working with for years ~ fantasy, science fiction, detective, mystery, western, adventure, romance, you’ll find it all covered in the pulp fiction classics of yesteryear.

When I was a boy I spent a LOT of time lost in the pages of reprinted stories from the old pulp mags (hiding under the covers with a flashlight when I should have been sleeping!), especially stories from the classic pulp mag, “Weird Tales” (I was a real sucker for anything written by Robert E. Howard).

I haven’t gotten to it yet, but it’s always been a dream of mine to publish collections of public domain pulp short stories in hardback omnibus editions.

If this sounds like your sort of thing, then you could do something similar very easily ~ there’s plenty of content to go around for both of us!

Interested?

First, let’s start with a proper introduction to the world of “the pulps”...

A Crash Course In Pulp Fiction History:

(courtesy of Wikipedia.org)

“Pulp magazines (or pulp fiction; often referred to as “the pulps”) were inexpensive fiction magazines. They were widely published from the 1920s through the 1950s. The term pulp fiction can also refer to mass market paperbacks since the 1950s.

The name “pulp” comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which such magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper and usually offering family-oriented content were often called “glossies” or “slicks”. Pulps were the successor to the “penny dreadfuls”, “dime novels”, and short fiction magazines of the nineteenth century.

Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are perhaps best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories, and for their similarly sensational cover art.

Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of “hero pulps”; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Phantom Detective.

Pulp covers, printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper, were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines, and a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages.

Among the most famous pulp artists were Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, Edd Cartier, Margaret Brundage and Norman Saunders. Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.

Pulps were typically seven inches wide by ten inches high, about half an inch thick, having around 128 pages. In their first decades, they were most often priced at ten cents, while competing slicks were twenty-five cents.

The first “pulp” is considered to be Frank Munsey’s revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896, about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations, not even on the cover.

While the steam powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people. In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.

At their peak of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue. Among the best-known titles of this period were Adventure, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Marvel Tales, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown and Weird Tales.

The Second World War paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Beginning with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1941, pulp magazines began to switch to digest size; smaller, thicker magazines.

In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks. The pulp format declined from rising expenses, but even more due to the heavy competition from comic books, television, and the paperback novel. In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant.

The 1957 bankruptcy of the American News Company, then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the “pulp era”; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation, including Black Mask, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Weird Tales, were defunct.

Most all of the few remaining pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines now in formats similar to “digest size”, such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; Harry Steeger of Popular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month. Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly.

The collapse of the pulp industry has changed the landscape of publishing in that pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories; combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, people attempting to support themselves by writing fiction must now generally write novels or book-length anthologies of shorter pieces.

Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction, including, but not limited to, fantasy/sword and sorcery, gangster, detective/mystery, science fiction, adventure, westerns, war, sports, railroad, romance, horror/occult (including “weird menace”), “spicy/saucy” (soft porn), and Série Noire (French crime mystery). The American Old West was a mainstay genre of early turn of the century novels as well as later pulp magazines, and lasted longest of all the traditional pulps.

Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Black Mask.”

(END Wikipedia.org)

Now, let’s get our feet wet by dipping our toes into the wide variety of pulpy goodness hosted at “The Online Pulps Site”…

The Online Pulps Site:

“Welcome to the Online Pulps site. The purpose of this site is to provide a wide selection of stories from the pulps. Here you will find stories from nearly every genre…detective, science ficton, adventure, romance, western, weird menace, sports, aviation, and even finance!

One final comment about these texts before you start downloading them … they are not edited for political correctness. They are a reflection of the times in which they were written and sometimes that mirror shows us something ugly. It is my opinion that it is better to look into that mirror and recognize how far we have progressed and hope that we continue to do so, rather than try to change the past.”

The Online Pulps Site acts as a repository for vintage pulp fiction and as such, draws together hundreds of short stories from many of the best pulp mags in publishing history.

The Online Pulps Site contains many stories from the following pulp titles…

Title:	Pulp Magazines represented by the Online Pulps site...
Description:

Volunteers at the site have done an amazing job of gathering, scanning, editing, and placing hundreds of pulp fiction stories on the site in downloadable PDF format.

=> Click Here To Browse Stories by Magazine

=> Click Here To Browse Stories by Author

Now, A Word of Caution…

While I truly believe that the owner and volunteers at this site have done an excellent job of checking the copyright status of each story before placing on this site, you should still do your due diligence before republishing any story found here.

Checking the copyright status of any story found here is easy and involves the exact same process used to determine the copyright status of a magazine article originally published in the U.S. (NOTE: there are some stories reprinted from U.K. and Canadian pulps listed here as well ~ these are very clearly marked).

For indentification, each story lists which mag it was originally published in as well as the month and year published.

To Determine The Copyright Status Of A Particular Story…

1) First check the copyright status of the magazine issue that the story was originally published in…

2) If the magazine issue has entered the public domain, then you’ll want to check the copyright status of the story itself.

We talked a little bit about how to verify the copyright status of a magazine here…

How To Tell If A Magazine Is In The Public Domain…

If the story has entered the public domain as well, then you’re free to republish!

Also, don’t forget that ebay and abebooks are excellent resources for tracking down copies of these old pulp mags that are chock full of great stories that you can scan in yourself (probably goes without saying that you should verify public domain status first).

Have fun!

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