Every year, I get excited to check out what the new books and movies and songs entering the public domain are. I first learned of Public Domain Day while the US Public Domain was on pause, when the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School would post lists of what would have entered the public domain in a specific year either under the pre-1978 twenty-eight year maximum term or under the Life-Plus-50 rule used in most of the rest of the world at that time.I’ve enjoyed Public Domain Day even more since the 20-year pause caused by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act ended. Now, Public Domain Day means new works available places like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, or as I newly discovered in the last year Standard Ebooks, to take a look at how art got to where it is.In the past, I’ve gone through books for Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders, to help get public domain texts out for free access. This year, I started working on texts for Standard Ebooks because I really like that the titles aren’t just free but are well-formatted for reading on e-readers. During 2025, I produced three books for Standard Ebooks:The Road to Oz, the fifth book of L. Frank Baum’s Oz seriesBlind Mice, by C. Kay Scott (a pseudonym for Frederick Wellman, father of Manly Wade Wellman and a physician who was known as “The Casanova of Tropical Medicine”)John Silence Stories, a compilation of all the stories about the physician turned paranormal detective by Algernon Blackwood.I’ve been reading the Oz stories to my daughter as bedtime and nap time stories since she was an infant, so seeing The Road to Oz listed as a wanted title got my attention right away. The book is a fun travelogue story where Dorothy accidentally ends up back in Oz while helping someone walk down a street from her farm.I only came across Blind Mice as an entry in the wanted books list. It’s a plain “literary” fiction title, not usually my cup of tea. But this story about a dysfunctional family and the way this mother coming to town just wrecks life for her daughter and son-in-law just drew me in as I worked on it. I’m really glad I picked it up because it is not a book I think I normally would have taken a chance on.I’m a big fan of urban fantasy and paranormal detectives like Fox Mulder, October Daye, and Harry Dresden. I’d originally thought about compiling William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories to get some more genre fiction up on Standard Ebooks, but there’s three or four Carnacki stories still outside the public domain. Then I read that none other than H.P. Lovecraft had negatively reviewed Carnacki calling him a knock-off of Algernon’s John Silence. So then I dug into John Silence, who is one of the original supernatural detectives, basically written as “what if the supernatural red herrings in Sherlock Holmes weren’t red herrings?” It compiles all six John Silence stories into one volume and I really enjoyed reading through them and getting some more appreciation for where some of the tropes I look for in books come from. I especially liked the story “Ancient Sorceries,” which has some great puns.I also had a great time after those three producing four books which are just being released today for Public Domain Day. As of 2026, the first edition of the first four Nancy Drew Mystery Stories enter the public domain. I produced the Standard Ebooks editions for all four.The Secret of the Old ClockThe Hidden StaircaseThe Bungalow MysteryThe Mystery at Lilac InnA little over a year ago, my daughter and I were reading the Ordinary People Change the World series by Brad Meltzer, specifically I am Sonia Sotomayor. In the book, there’s a mention that Justice Sotomayor was a big fan of the Nancy Drew books as a girl and that her love for the books was an inspiration to go to law school and become an attorney. I found out about the Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew series, which is the more modern look at Nancy Drew aimed at 6-8 year olds. My daughter loved the books we picked up from that series and also the Nancy Drew Clue Book series which is for the same age but has a thing before the last chapter of each book where it asks kids to come up with their own answer and reasoning before Nancy solves the mystery.So when the email of Public Domain Day projects for 2026 came out, I was totally ready to work on the Nancy Drew books to make sure that these ones were there and ready for my daughter.I’d enjoyed the Clue Crew and Clue Book stories, but like with Blind Mice, I was pleasantly surprised just how much I liked these original 1930 stories.The Secret of the Old Clock features Nancy Drew trying to track down a second will written by a rich old man who’s died before his mean relatives can secure his entire fortune. There’s peril, there’s tension, there’s a lot more there than I was expecting for a “kids’ mystery book.”The Hidden Staircase continues the trend of tense mysteries, with Nancy Drew being recommended by one of the women she’d helped by finding the will in the first book to a friend who is having “ghost trouble” in her house. Nancy looks into where missing items are going and investigates the source of strange noises in the house.The Bungalow Mystery begins with Nancy Drew and her friend Helen Corning in a boat on a lake when a storm hits. They are saved by a girl named Laura Pendleton, who visits them at camp and reveals that her mother has recently died and she is supposed to be meeting her new guardian and is nervous. When Nancy leaves camp, she finds Laura on the road, having run away. Nancy decides to look into the story Laura tells about an abusive guardian. Nancy’s sleuthing leads to a huge upswing in the peril she faces in the books.The Mystery at Lilac Inn tells the story of Nancy Drew helping a friend find who stole her inherited jewels. Nancy speaks with and looks into different ideas of who may have taken the jewels while Emily Crandall’s guardian was distracted by a car crash outside the titular inn where she was having lunch. Again, Nancy’s sleuthing leads to great peril as her leads take her into a dangerous situation.I really enjoyed these Nancy Drew books, they had excitement and adventure in a way that I didn’t really walk in expecting. The one downside is that there are some ethnic stereotypes about some Black and Irish characters that might not have been considered strictly “negative” in 1930, but come across so in 2026. The first book phonetically spells out a helpful Black character’s dialect, the second features a slovenly Black housekeeper, the third an Irish housekeeper who turns out to be a criminal.So, I wish you all a happy Public Domain Day, and hope you’ll take a chance on some book, whether a classic you’ve never gotten around to, or something lesser known that piques your interest. There’s a lot out there to pick from!
