The Scripta Amissa Project Q&A

Q: Okay, let’s start with that name: what does ‘scripta amissa’ mean?

A: It’s Latin, and it means “lost writings” in English. That’s the heart of the project: locating and reprinting lost writings of the mid-20th century. 

Q: What defines a ‘lost’ writing in this project?

A: In its truest sense, writing that was published from 1950 through 1963 and, for one reason or another, was never reprinted or collected following that initial appearance, and wasn’t subsequently renewed under the requirements of the Copyright Act of 1976, leaving it in the public domain. That’s the project’s sweet spot.

Q: Wait - I thought the 1976 US Copyright Act extended everybody’s copyrights.

A: It did, but with a catch. If the work was published 1/1/1964 or later, the 1976 act and a later revision provided automatic benefit to change from an initial 28 year protection that could be renewed for a second 28-year term to protection for the life of the author plus 50 years. But the 1976 act required any work in its first copyright term from 1950 to 12/31/1963 to file the required renewal by the end of the first term to get the added protection. If the copyright holder didn’t file that renewal, the work went into the public domain at the end of the first term.

Q: How much work like this is in the public domain?

A: No one has an exact count, but a New York Public Library catalog project that studied a sampling of registered work for that period estimates only 25% of all books published in the period required to file a renewal were actually renewed. This happened to every writer of the era, big names and small, famous and forgotten.

Q: Why wouldn't an author renew their copyright? 

A: There are a number of possible reasons. Some may lost track of things in the churn of creating new work; they may have seen the work as dated or single-purpose and lacking in future value; they may have moved on to other things and become unconcerned with it; they may have died and not left complete records with their heirs. I have trouble sometimes remembering last year. Remembering to send the government a form in 1983 for something first published in 1955? It’s a wonder anything was renewed. 

Q: Aren’t there already lots of people releasing public domain work?

A: More than a few. There are projects that identify and collect it, and there are publishers who reprint it. When you look into it, you find a lot of them are simply reprinting the same stories from the same sources in a variety of formats. 

Q: How is the Scripta Amissa Project different? 

A: We’re looking for truly obscure works, things lost in the cracks and largely forgotten. Maybe it’s an early piece from a fanzine or a small magazine, maybe it’s a story that shows up on a table of contents that a writer’s bibliography is missing. We’re looking at multiple story list sources and cross-referencing them with period writing resources—indices, reference works, trade magazines—to locate potentials. Sometimes, you dig in and find that a story that looks unknown is merely a retitling—some Gerald Kersh stories have as many as a half-dozen reprints under alternate titles. When we find an actual overlooked story, we research it to ensure it’s no longer under copyright. If there’s any question about status, we leave it by the wayside. Same if we find it’s been reprinted or made available by someone else, except in rare cases. 

Q: Are you just reprinting the stories?

A: We’re also opening each chapbook with a contextual introduction that provides the reader with information about the story and how it fits in the greater scheme of the writer’s life or career at the time it was written. One of the Charles Portis pieces in #2, published once in his college newspaper, has an interesting history around it that enhances the item for the reader; likewise, there’s a thread that connects the pieces in the Gerald Kersh volume we’re preparing that includes an international incident. So we’re not just pushing out a story and saying “Here you go.” We think context is important to any story you decide to read, to understand how it fits in the greater picture of the writer.

Q: What was the genesis of the project?  

A: I like to do deep dives on writers whose work I enjoy. Most writers have stories and other pieces that never or rarely get reprinted, so I like to find a bibliography with some meat on it and use it as a checklist for tracking down the missing pieces. One of these writers was Charles Beaumont. I grew up on The Twilight Zone, which led to Beaumont’s short stories, and ultimately to William F. Nolan’s bibliography of Beaumont’s work. And because I get obsessive about knowing things, and because I found at least one Beaumont piece while casting about that Nolan had overlooked, I started adding notes to Beaumont’s bibliography, and decided to see if anything else turned up in copyright records. Along the way, I stumbled into several letters Beaumont wrote to a southern California auto-racing publication in the mid-fifties that dovetailed with a racing story published in a different regional race magazine, and it provided an interesting—to me, anyway—insight into how Beaumont created. I jotted down some notes for my own edification and moved on.

When I learned about the 1976 copyright renewal exception, I began thinking about the really obscure pieces that might be in the public domain and what they might say about the writer, and the first works I researched were the Beaumont racing story in question and an article he wrote drawn on work as a writer and editor at Dell comics. While his estate had filed renewals on the majority of his work, there were several things they hadn’t renewed, including the two pieces that comprise our first volume, Charles Beaumont: Driven Interests. And I fleshed out my notes to give the reader a window into how his passion for racing and his background in comics translated into them, which are both very un-Twilight Zone. 

Q: What do you hope to accomplish with the project?

A: First, preservation. A lot of bibliographies are incomplete, especially as shortened digital ones push the older, more detailed ones to the side. Things get truncated. Other things go unrecorded. Some writers are neglected. There’s no guarantee a writer’s papers ever make it to an archive or that the publications containing work are digitized or were microfilmed. Physical media degrades or, worse, is willfully destroyed. I don’t just mean the idea of cutting up rare books to feed to an AI; in the 80s and 90s, there was a fad of trying to make a few bucks by slicing up old magazines to resell the advertisements to product enthusiasts. There are also magazines no one thought to save. Beaumont had two pieces in the magazine for Carte Blanche credit card holders in the early sixties. Try finding those today. The pieces by Beaumont in our first volume were in California regional magazines that were both defunct by the early sixties. I can't prove they were microfilmed or if library-bound volumes exist. How close to disappearing entirely was either piece?

Second, we want readers to see other sides of the writers we present. Alfred Bester, who’s the subject of an upcoming volume, is basically remembered as the science fiction Grand Master who won the first Hugo award for Best Novel, wrote a couple of novels in the fifties that shaped the genre plus a handful of great sf short stories, and then spent the rest of his career dropping in and out of the genre, writing some bonkers sf and fantasy you either loved or hated. He gets knocked for not having written more sf. But there are dimensions of Bester that have simply been forgotten because his science fiction is all that gets reprinted. His bibliography is deep. In the late 1950s throughout the 1960s, he was writing Hollywood feature stories and interviews for Holiday magazine, stuff that was brilliantly written, and it was work he loved. These articles were being excerpted nationally almost monthly in newspapers. For a while, his name was showing up everywhere. That writing stands toe-to-toe with any pop culture work written by his contemporaries—I’d pit it against Harlan Ellison’s film reviews without question—but it’s all largely lost. Bester has blossomed into a cultural historian, and people mention him doing it, but can’t easily read any of it because the only work of his that has any perceived market value today is his sf.

And third, we want readers to have the joy of something new that they aren’t expecting. If you’re familiar with a writer we feature, we want to give you something you may not have seen. If you’re new to them, maybe you’re interested enough to dig deeper. It’s a lot like finding buried treasure, except if we’ve done it right, everybody who cares can get in on the wonder of the find.

Q: Is this a science fiction series? You’ve named a lot of sf and fantasy writers.

A: If there’s an initial lean on sf, it’s because that’s what we know, but we really don’t care about a writer’s genre. Genres are pigeon holes. We want to turn writers across the spectrum this way and that to see what we can see. I wouldn’t have thought a grim Charles Portis Korean War story that’s never been reprinted was a thing, but that’s coming in December in #2.    

Q: How long do you plan to do this? I mean, there’s only so much buried treasure.

A: Right now, six volumes are in the pipeline. Three are already set for release, three more are being laid out for editing and proofing. There’s research being done for an additional six, but how long the Scripta Amissa Project goes depends largely on reader response. We’ll take a look as we come up on the sixth, and if there’s only been a collective shrug, we’ll wrap it up there. From a technical standpoint, the project could go indefinitely. There’s one very prolific writer of the fifties and sixties who published over 400 stories in their career. Copyrights on a quarter of those were never renewed. If I focused solely on that writer, I could produce three and a half year’s worth of Scripta Amissa. But the question then becomes one of quality over quantity. We want to keep it interesting, and there’s plenty to work with.

Q: Is there anyone you won’t be investigating for lost writings?

A: Well, any writer’s work copyrighted after 1/1/64 is right out unless the Powerball calls me home and licensing fees become a non-issue. Of writers who wrote in the period, the literary heavy hitters I enjoy are very complete in print. For example, there’s no uncollected William Faulkner. Winning the Nobel Prize will do that for your work. In sf, there’s almost nothing to be done with Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, both of whom have been extensively collected and reprinted. Others, like Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson, have been heavily gathered by specialty presses in the last fifty years. Harlan and Susan Ellison were scrupulous keepers of his copyrights; there are literally crumbs. (It was Susan who—at a Los Angeles-area signing Harlan did in the 1990s—purchased a guide to copyright from the store at which he was reading, pressed into my hands, and commanded me to read it cover to cover.) And most UK writers, because their copyright law fell in line with the Berne Convention in 1886 and established protection for the author’s life plus 50 years nine decades before the US did, are also out.

Q: Is there anyone whose work you’re hoping to locate?

A: We’re digging some interesting writers, but if there’s one? IF they’re real (I doubt they are) and IF they could be located (they can’t because they’re a tall tale), the alleged pulp fiction stories about a boy detective that Orson Welles purportedly wrote and which were allegedly published stateside while he was in Spain would be a good day in the stacks.