Diane Plumley

Copyright, Book Illustrations, and the Internet

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In the public domain.

I collect vintage images–illustrations, as it were. Have for over 40 years. Paper ephemera, books, sheet music, postcards, Halloween, greeting cards,  bridge tallies, you name it, if it’s illustrated art–I collect it. And on flickr I found a community of others just like me. I began sharing this collection as I continued making vintage illustration jewelry from my collections, and from things I found floating around on the fabulous internet. And, from some things I found on flickr-that was downloadable and in the public domain. What does that mean? I can only speak for the United States, because other countries have different laws, but, anything, anything printed before 1923 is in the public domain. Which means they are not protected or owned by any individual. I checked this over and over again, due to problems that occurred on flickr when I had the audacity to explain that I was going to start a digital download business, and that there was a slim possibility that some images from flickr streams may get into my business–inadvertently. I am nothing, if not stupid enough to be honest about what I am doing. This started a mini firestorm of flickr morality. And supposed legal questions. And here’s the point of this post.

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Elaine Viets–Witty Writer, Broadcaster, Newbie Private Eye–10 Questions

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The latest release-on bookshelves now!

I don’t write reviews on amazon. OK, I wrote maybe three–but I had to be highly motivated and passionate about what I was reviewing to dip into that cesspool of bizarreness. And I was. Elaine Viets, mystery writer, had begun a new series at the time, and I was wildly in love with it. Here is part of what I wrote:

“Helen Hawthorne, once quite successful, is forced to lay low, changing cities and jobs as quickly as she used to change her designer shoes. Her new profession, salesclerk in a chi chi Florida boutique whose green door keeps out lowlife Sears Robuck rejects, forces her to do more than cater to collagen frozen faces. Underneaththe fashionable facade, a nefarious manager has embezzled bucks, and when a murder occurs, Helen must find the perpetrator before her past catches up with her. A six toed cat, a real character of a landlady, and very cheap wine bought by the case, comfort Helen as she works to solve the crime.”
The review was written about the Dead End Job series starring Helen Hawthorne, a woman on the run and forced to take jobs that pay under the table. Elaine would work in the various positions she writes about to make Helen’s experiences as realistic and truthful as possible. And they are. She has written a slew (11) of Dead End Job books since the debut–Shop Until you Drop, including one on my  Best 100 Mysteries of All Time list–Murder Between The Covers.  Apparently one exceptional series is not enough work for Elaine, she created another with a secret shopper, Josie Marcus, her latest, Murder Is a Piece of Cake, just released. (That’s number 8.) I’m clearly biased–I’ve known, admired, and called Ms. Viets a friend for over a decade. But even if I’d never met her, I’d still love her rich characters, witty dialog, and satisfying plots. Here’s the 10 questions and answers.

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Pinning Books

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One of the Christmas books available on a Pinterest board

I suppose this is a good tool for online sellers. After all, even the bookshopblog has a spot where you can ‘pin’ what you see. ABE sent another one of their cool little articles, and I thought I’d be seeing a nice ditty on holiday books, the why, wherefores, etc. No- after I clicked-a Pinterest board popped up filled with sunny sideways and front covers of Christmas titles.When you click on Santa, a page full of  the edition displayed  and the various booksellers who have it for your buying convenience, appears. Why should this bother me? It shouldn’t–and it doesn’t when booksellers are touting their wares. It seems odd, but then so does the entire internet, but I’ve gotten used to it the way an old person gets used to new fangled ideas.

What drives me to distraction, is once an image is ‘pinned’ it is there for eternity. No matter what you may do, say, remove the book from sale, or in my case, make my entire flickr account private–tons and tons of my personal images that I worked on to restore, are pinned and re-pinned and re-pinned for the next millennium, and  there isn’t a darn thing I can do about it. Ask for them to be taken down, you say? Yeah, that’l happen–they could care less about public domain images taken without permission from a public site, even if it isn’t public anymore. Apparently once it is pinned, that generates an entirely new self reliant image–that’s the best way I can describe it, having no understanding of these things. So although a ‘link’ is supplied back to the source–(a tiny lip balm for a monstrous gash)–doesn’t matter if the link no longer works and the image now private–it’s still up on a person’s board. And will be taken and re-pinned again and again.

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John Martin’s Book, The Child’s Magazine

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Typical cover of a John Martin’s Book.

When I go through the piles of vintage children’s magazines I’ve collected over the years, one thing strikes me. Kids don’t read this kind of stuff anymore. They probably don’t read at all, but the historical and classic tilt to the John Martin’s Book, The Child’s Magazine, may be over the heads of most children today. I realize we are supposed to be more educated, technically advanced, better off than back in 1912 when this man began his publishing, but as far as what kids were expected to know, expected to learn, expected to memorize in the past, education has been dumbed down, or in nicer vocabulary, simplified.

Up until I just googled him, I knew very little about the man behind these extraordinary publications. I knew his real name wasn’t John Martin, although I could never imagine such an interesting one as Morgan van Roorbach Shepard. His life reads like an adventure story, or a tale from Dickens. He was born in Brooklyn, and  grew up on a plantation. Right here, the story seems implausible. For some reason, he decided to retain the last name of the either a ‘colony’ of people  named Martin, or bunches of birds–wiki doesn’t explain. Devastated by his mother’s death when he was nine, he was shunted off to boarding schools. According to wikipedia, he was often bullied, but considering the new popularity of that word, I have my doubts as to what that means. I also don’t know what, if anything, suffering in boarding school like most kids who attend, did to form his character. He told a tale of being a revolutionary in some South American country, was fired as a conductor on a San francisco  trolly car for giving free rides to children and specific adults, and began his own greeting card company in a building destroyed by the famous 1906 earthquake, in which he was injured. Supposedly it was during his convalescence he began writing stories and poems for children, which after several years became long illustrated letters to thousands of kids, and in 1912 became the magazine.

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The End For An Historic Library?

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Sometimes it takes the threat of an important part of life being taken away, to realize it exists in the first place. That’s how it felt when I googled The Mount Holly Library and Lyceum, and realized I was eligible to take out a card and borrow books. It’s open to all who live in Burlington County, NJ. At least for the moment. Because this historic body, the fifth oldest in the state, is threatened with closure in the New Year if funds are not forthcoming. The local newspaper, The Burlington County Times,  alerted residents to the possibility of closure by January 1 in today’s edition. Alicia McShulkis, vice president of the Mount Holly board of trustees said that unless someone has some ideas for funding, the library can no longer subsist. The director of the library, Michael Eck believes they have a small window still, and they wouldn’t close until “later in the year” but “without township support, we aren’t going to make it.”

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Suicidal Heroines

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Crushed by steel wheels.

Anna Karenina has been made into a film. Again. I’m not certain how many times this new production makes, but in my opinion, it’s too many times. There is a finite

Drug overdose.

amount of women committing suicide as a legitimate solution to their problems, I can take. Romanticizing the taking of one’s existence is ingrained into society’s fabric. If the people doing it are beautiful and in many cases helpless women. Greta Garbo standing on the edge of the railroad platform ready to dive, may seem like a

dramatic and tragic ending, but in fact, if viewers were to see her remains after said train’s vicious steel wheels crushed her beautiful face to pulp, and her gorgeous costumes were clotted with skin, bone, and brain matter, how romantic would her death then seem? Sure, she had abandoned her child and husband for a lover who then tosses her aside. And the punishment for those sins in that period of history? Social disgrace, maybe even being thrown on the streets with nothing. But why must the cost of a woman’s independence in the books of that era, always seem to be death?

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The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Best 100 Mysteries of All time

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Pulp paperback version who lists Hopley as author, and then claims another Woolrich pen name as the real author.

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes—George Hopley–(Cornell Woolrich)–1948–IP

Of  the numerous novels of suspense Woolrich has written and I’ve read, The Night Has a Thousand Eyescaused the most tense and angst filled moments. The uneasy

The younger Cornell Woolrich.

reality of a Woolrich novel is the knowledge that the conclusion of the story can go either way. A relentless dark hopeless story can end miraculously, or tragically. The reader is unaware of which will prevail until nearly the last words. The journey to the conclusion can be nerve shattering in intensity. In the instance of this novel, it haunted me, and now that I’m rethinking, it still does. It’s a novel of predestination, of a lack of control over life and death, of hope that ekes along, but barely.

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John The Eunuch and Mary Reed, Eric Mayer–10 Questions

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Ancient history is not a strong suit of mine. I enjoy it, especially when served up with mysterious mayhem and murder. Still, not having indulged in Mary Reed and Eric Mayer’s highly regarded series of John The Eunuch, I almost felt at a loss as to what questions I could ask. A little research into the books  helped, and the husband and wife writing duo’s detailed answers are filled with all the atmosphere, style, and  history one could possibly need to get started and delve into their work.

The series protagonist is John the Eunuch, Emperor Justinian’s Lord Chamberlain. Set in the Byzantine 6th century Roman Empire, real and fictional characters appear side by side and for those of us who know nothing about that period, an entire new world will open up! The series has received numerous starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, was a finalist for the IPPY Best Mystery Award, nominated for the Bruce Alexander History Mystery Award, the American Library Association’s Booklist Magazine named the Lord Chamberlain novels as one of its four Best Little Known Series. and was nominated multiple times and won the Glyph Award from Arizona Book Publishing Association for Best Book Series. So, take a trip to another time and world with Mary and Eric.

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