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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know how I should feel about this but I don’t recognize many books published in 1923. I was looking to see what classics I could easily add to my Kindle but the list doesn’t seem as recognizable as 1922 or 1924. Some of the things I recognize from 1923 are parts of series (Poirot, Jeeves & Wooster) rather than stand-alone books.

Can anyone recommend something from 1923?

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Three of my favorites:

The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58585

Men Like Gods, by H. G. Wells http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200221h.html

Leave It To Psmith, by P.G. Wodehouse https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.126397/page/n1

This is the argument I've heard from Fine Arts people on the subject of the written word:

You won't have heard of any of those books from '23. Your English teacher picked books that they could get for next to nothing for a roomful of students (eg, public domain "classics"), or suck it up and fight for their absolute favorite book of all time.

So you're mostly going to hear of really old books in class, and really modern books from media and friends, and between that maybe the best 50 books from the last 50 years from proper literary mavens.

By moving the public domain forward in time you start opening up the opportunity for kids to hear about books from the 20's and 30's, things that might tie into History class (the Depression, the leadup to WWII) and thus into other aspects of life (civics, poli-sci, etc).

So your kids will know of books from the 20's, their kids books from the 40's (Tolkien), and so on. And your great great grandchild will encounter Harry Potter for the first time in the 7th grade.

I'm not sure. I admittedly didn't go to a public school but we definitely had in-copyright books from John Hersey, Pearl Buck, James Hilton, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway. Maybe that qualifies as "maybe the best 50 books from the last 50 years from proper literary mavens" but, in general, I'm not sure that out-of-copyright was overrepresented for any reason but that they were Western canon. (And, in many cases, not very readable by high-schoolers.)

I'm all for shorter copyright terms of course.

There were certainly classes where we had paperbacks, but you don't spend an entire semester going over one book. I think other than electives and higher education, I rarely saw more than one paperback per semester, and a few of those were mandated by the state board of education (eg, Animal Farm).

In the earliest book-heavy class I can recall, probably senior year of high school, we read a bunch of Edgar Allen Poe out of the textbook (Poe is out of copyright). There were book reports, but that was one copy per student and I think more than a few of us checked books out of the library for this.

I think Gatsby was the only book we had to buy that year. That book is from 1925, and should have been out of copyright decades ago. So that everyone could suffer^W enjoy it for free.

Goodreads has "Popular by Date" functionality that will help a lot. Just a glance at the top of the list shows The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, Bambi by Felix Salten, some Borges, some Lovecraft, the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen by Howard Carter, The Ego and the Id by Freud...

Overall I'd agree with you. Most of the specific titles I recognize from this list are dry, downbeat and not the strongest or most memorable work from those authors. The rest is either series material with characters or stuff that seems to have been forgotten.

Borges is probably no good in this context; the original Spanish might've been published in 1923, but the English translations will be more recent.

What? There are 400+ million native speakers of Spanish in the world. Second language included? 600+

And this is an English-language website predominantly read by users in the US about a change in status under US copyright law.

I think you underestimate HN's international readership.

I appreciate that HN is more cosmopolitan then people think :-). People from different countries often bring great perspective to things that I wouldn't have come up with on my own. Another argument for the benefit of diversity, I'd say.

I don't think I do, and I've looked at the estimated geoips of hundreds of thousands of HN hits to my website: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rtqafvuy18awda6/Analytics%20www.gw...

You see many Spanish-speaking countries listed...?

While I agree with your premise, it's not wrong to think of it the other way too (especially in terms of numbers as opposed to percentages)

Nevertheless, 13% of the US population are native Spanish speakers[1], and presumably more have some level of reading skills. Hard to judge overlap with HN readership, but it's probably fair to think that 4-5% of your sites readers can read Spanish.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language_in_the_United...

> Hard to judge overlap with HN readership,

Low. Very low. Think about the Hispanic population a little.

> but it's probably fair to think that 4-5% of your sites readers can read Spanish.

If they are, they aren't setting their OSes or browsers to use Spanish rather than English... An 'es' language code doesn't even show up in my GA language headers until #13 (consistent with the geoip), putting them at ~0.5% of all hits. I have more German, French, and Russian-preferring readers than Spanish (which is only slightly more popular than Portuguese). HN is cosmopolitan, but all the evidence I have is that it's not in a Spanish sort of way.

I think what he's saying is that the translation is still under copyright. Only the original would be public domain.

Theres a translation of Da Vinci's notebooks mentioned on the website. One would hope that the original had fallen out of copyright by now, so its only the translation that is falling out of copyright.

Exactly. I produce ebooks for Standard Ebooks and there’s plenty of Russian literature that I’d like to do, we’re it not for the fact that the available translations are much later than 1923 even if the original books were published earlier.

In drama, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. Though, of course, better seen performed. There is also Robert Frost poetry although much of that was already widely available.

> Robert Frost poetry.

The collection New Hampshire seems to be from '23.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire_(poetry_collec...

Here it is on a Canadian website (where it was already PD)

https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180949

Doctor Dolittle's Post Office

(also Richard Dawkins' favourite, curiously. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-book-th... )

Perhaps easiest to use Goodreads date search as a basic filter: https://www.goodreads.com/book/popular_by_date/1923/

I had found that list, but it doesn't really come with any kind of interpretation.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is from 1923 and is considered an investing classic. It is a good read (and still relevant) if you are remotely interested in trading.

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