34 Webster, “Diary,” in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 219.
35 When George Washington married Martha Custis in 1759, Custis already had two children from a previous marriage. The Washingtons had no children of their own.
36 Webster, “Memoir,” in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 143–44.
37 Noah Webster, “The News-Boy’s Address to His Customers,” in Poems by Noah Webster.
38 Oren Bracha, “The Adventures of the Statute of Anne in the Land of Unlimited Possibilities: The Life of a Legal Transplant,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 25, no. 1427 (2010): 1453.
39 William Patry, “The First Copyright Act,” Copyright Law and Practice, http://digital-law-online.info/patry/patry5.html.
40 Ibid.
41 Meredith L. McGill, “Copyright,” in Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic, 199.
42 Richard R. John, “Expanding the Realm of Communications,” in Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic, 216.
43 Noah Webster, “The Editor’s Address to the Public,” in American Minerva, December 9, 1793.
44 Lee, Daily Newspaper in America, 711.
45 Coll, “Noah Webster,” 174.
46 Ibid., 190.
47 Webster to Oliver Wolcott Jr., April 13, 1801, in Ford, Notes, 1:530.
48 Webster to Joel Barlow, November 16, 1798, in Webster, Letters, 192.
49 Webster to Benjamin Rush, December 15, 1800, in Webster, Letters, 228.
50 Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, 51.
51 Webster to Joel Barlow, November 12, 1807, in Ford, Notes, 2:32.
52 Webster to Oliver Wolcott Jr., June 18, 1807, in Snyder, Defining Noah Webster, 322.
53 Webster to David Ramsay, October 1807, in Webster, Letters, 291.
54 Ibid., 287.
55 Snyder, Defining Noah Webster, 323.
56 Ford, Notes, 2:116.
57 John, “Expanding the Realm,” 216.
58 Andie Tucher, “Newspapers and Periodicals,” in Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic, 395.
59 Webster to Thomas Dawes, July 25, 1809, in Webster, Letters, 318–19.
60 Webster to John Jay, June 9, 1813, in Ford, Notes, 2:121.
61 Webster to John Pickering, December 1816, in Webster, Letters, 371.
62 Webster to Stephen van Rensselaer, November 5, 1821, in Webster, Letters, 406.
63 Webster to Samuel Latham Mitchill, December 12, 1823, in Webster, Letters, 411.
64 Ford, Notes, 2:293.
65 Ibid., 2:304–5.
66 Abraham Webster to Noah Webster, January 26, 1830, in Ford, Notes, 2:313.
67 Unger, Noah Webster, 307.
68 See Micklethwait, Noah Webster and the American Dictionary, for more on this.
69 Webster, “Origin of the Copy-Right Laws,” 176.
70 Webster to William Chauncey Fowler, January 26, 1831, in Webster, Letters, 425.
71 Ibid.
72 See Catherine Seville, “The Statute of Anne: Rhetoric and Reception in the Nineteenth Century,” Houston Law Review 47, no. 4 (2010): 819–75.
73 Meredith L. McGill, “Copyright,” in Casper et al., Industrial Book, 159.
74 Webster to Rebecca Greenleaf Webster, February 7, 1831, in Ford, Notes, 2:326.
75 Webster to William Chauncey Fowler, January 29, 1831, in Webster, Letters, 425.
76 David Leverenz, “Men Writing in the Early Republic,” in Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic, 356.
2. A TAX ON KNOWLEDGE
1 Hannay, Life of Frederick Marryat, 77. The historical price conversion, roughly accurate as of July 2015, was performed using the Composite Price Index compiled by the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics, and the equation proposed by Jim O’Donoghue, Louise Golding, and Grahame Allen in their paper “Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750,” Economic Trends 604 (March 2004).
2 Ibid., 76–77.
3 Harper, House of Harper, 89–90.
4 Earl L. Bradsher, “Book Publishers and Publishing,” in Trent et al., The Cambridge History of American Literature, 3:541 (half a million copies); and Petition of British Authors, Washington, DC (1837), Primary Sources on Copyright, eds. Bently and Kretschmer.
5 Editors’ Table, Knickerbocker 15, no. 6 (June 1840): 529.
6 Dickens to Henry Austin, May 1, 1842, in Letters of Charles Dickens, 1:83.
7 Arno L. Bader, “Captain Marryat and the American Pirates,” in Library, 1935, 328.
8 Hannay, Life of Frederick Marryat, 59.
9 The Locofocos were a faction of libertarian Democrats who enjoyed a brief period of national influence in the 1830s and 1840s.
10 Marryat, Second Series, 76.
11 Ibid., 70.
12 Marryat, Life and Letters, 2:19.
13 The American vessel was the steamboat Caroline, which had been aiding Canadian rebels who were resisting British rule. Loyalist forces captured the Caroline and sent it over Niagara Falls.
14 Marryat, Diary in America, 9.
15 Marryat, Second Series, 65.
16 McGrane, Panic of 1837, 1.
17 Dickens to John Forster, May 3, 1842, in Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 1:409.
18 Marryat, Second Series, 64.
19 Putnam, The Tourist in Europe, 172.
20 Marryat, Second Series, 77.
21 Petition of British Authors, Washington, DC (1837), Primary Sources on Copyright, eds. Bently and Kretschmer.
22 Marryat, Second Series, 71.
23 Debates in Congress, 670.
24 Ibid., 671.
25 Bishop, “Struggle for International Copyright,” 105–6.
26 Lee, Daily Newspaper in America, 718.
27 McLeod, Pranksters, 115–17.
28 Johnson, “The People’s Book,” 32.
29 Louise Stevenson, “Homes, Books, and Reading,” in Casper et al., Industrial Book, 327.
30 Marryat, Second Series, 65.
31 Solberg, International Copyright, 10.
32 Quoted in Johnson, Charles Dickens, 1:367.
33 Dickens to John Forster, May 3, 1842, in Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 1:409.
34 Mathews, Various Writings, 364.
35 “The International Copyright Law, and Mr. Dickens,” Arcturus 3, no. 16 (March 1842): 247.
36 Miller, Raven and the Whale, 80.
37 Madeleine B. Stern, “Introduction,” in Publishers for Mass Entertainment, ix.
38 Mathews, Various Writings, 363.
39 George Haven Putnam, “International Copyright.—VI,” Publishers’ Weekly, March 22, 1879, 351.
40 Weeks, History of Paper-Manufacturing, 287.
41 Ibid., 294.
42 Foner, Great Labor Uprising, 13.
43 Madeleine B. Stern, “Popular Books in the Midwest and Far West,” Getting the Books Out, ed. Michael Hackenberg, 83.
44 Lawrence Parke Murphy, “Beadle & Co,” in Stern, Publishers for Mass Entertainment, 49.
45 “Book-A-Day Lovell Set Many Records,” Montreal Gazette, April 23, 1932.
46 Lovell, “The Canadian Incursion,” Publishers’ Weekly, April 19, 1879, 471.
47 Putnam, Memories, 169.
48 Ibid., 170.
49 Golway, Machine Made, 156–57.
50 “Our ‘Moral Pirates,’ ” Publishers’ Weekly, June 25, 1881, 693.
51 Advertisement in Publishers’ Weekly, June 26, 1880, 666.
52 Ibid.
53 Putnam, Memories, 366.
54 Ibid., 367.
55 Putnam, “International Copyright.—VI.”
56 George Haven Putnam, “International Copyright.—IV,” Publishers’ Weekly, March 8, 1879, 284.
57 “The Copyright Question—Opinions of Publishers and Authors—VII,” Publishers’ Weekly, April 19, 1879, 469.
58 Gilder to James Bryce, May 8, 1883, in Gilder, Letters, 117.
59 Revision of Copyright Laws: Hearings Before the Committees on Patents of the Senate and the House of Representatives on Pending Bills to Amend and Consolidate the Acts
Respecting Copyright, 60th Cong. (1908) (statement of William Allen Jenner, March 27, 1908).
60 Putnam, Memories, 374.
61 Ibid., 376.
62 Ibid., 380.
63 Van Dyke, National Sin, 9.
64 Gardiner G. Hubbard, “International Copyright,” Science 7, no. 158 (February 12, 1886): 137.
65 Grover Cleveland, “Second Annual Message (First Term),” December 6, 1886. Put online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29527.
66 Gilder to Henry Adams, January 8, 1889, in Gilder, Letters, 202.
67 Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives, 7:25.
68 Twain, Autobiography, 2:319.
69 Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays, 246.
70 Ibid., 254.
71 Ibid., 257.
72 22 Cong. Rec. S3894 (March 3, 1891).
73 Ibid., S3905.
74 Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays, 258.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., 259.
77 Ibid.
78 Stedman and Gould, Life and Letters, 2:417.
79 Wilson, Labor of Words, 2.
80 Henry Holt, “The Commercialization of Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 96 (November 1905): 588.
81 Wilson, Labor of Words, 88.
3. A COPYRIGHT OF THE FUTURE, A LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE
1 Report of the Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 15.
2 City of Boston Statistics Department, Boston Statistics, 1922, 42.
3 Herbert Putnam, “The Great Libraries of the United States,” Forum 19 (June 1895): 492.
4 Quoted in Jones, “Constructing the Universal Library,” 130.
5 Putnam, “Great Libraries.”
6 Cole, For Congress and the Nation, 54.
7 Lee, Daily Newspaper in America, 715–17.
8 Herbert Putnam, “The Relation of Free Public Libraries to the Community,” North American Review 166, no. 499 (June 1898): 667.
9 Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, “A Framework for the History of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940,” in Print in Motion, eds. Kaestle and Radway, 14.
10 Wilson, Labor of Words, 3.
11 Putnam, “Relation of Free Public Libraries.”
12 Library of Congress, Herbert Putnam, 9.
13 Nichols, 1883 Triennial, 65.
14 Jane Aikin, “Referred to the Librarian, with Power to Act: Herbert Putnam and the Boston Public Library,” in Winsor, Dewey, and Putnam, ed. Davis et al., 30.
15 Quoted in Knowlton, Herbert Putnam: A 1903 Trip to Europe, 47.
16 “The New Librarian,” Washington Evening Star, April 5, 1899.
17 Putnam, “Relation of Free Public Libraries.”
18 Cole, For Congress and the Nation, 75.
19 Brylawski and Goldman, Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act, 2:199.
20 Ibid., 1:171.
21 Ibid., 2:167.
22 Ibid., 1:3.
23 Ibid., 4J:120.
24 Ibid., 4H:24.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 4J:310.
27 Ibid., 4J:321–33.
28 Ibid., 4H:141.
29 Ibid., 4J:33.
30 Ibid., 4H:98.
31 Ibid., 4H:115.
32 Ibid., 4J:315.
33 Ibid., 4J:33.
34 Ibid., 4H:3–4.
35 Ibid., 4H:77.
36 Quoted in Edward N. Waters, “Herbert Putnam: The Tallest Little Man in the World,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33, no. 2 (April 1976): 160. In 1904, Columbian College was rechristened the George Washington University.
37 Herbert Putnam, foreword to Koch, War Service, 6.
38 Quoted in Waters, “Herbert Putnam,” 163.
39 Knowlton, A 1903 Trip to Europe, 13.
40 Ibid., 50.
41 Ibid., 171.
42 Matt McDade, “Man of Books, at 92, Places Listening Ahead of Reading,” Washington Post and Times Herald, April 5, 1954.
43 In June 1967, Flushing Meadow Park was renamed Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.
44 “Dupont . . . at nywf64.com,” NYWF64.com, http://www.nywf64.com/dupont01.shtml.
45 “Formica . . . at nywf64.com,” NYWF64.com, http://www.nywf64.com/formica01.shtml
46 “United States . . . at nywf64.com,” NYWF64.com, http://www.nywf64.com/unista09.shtml.
47 Putnam, “Great Libraries.”
48 Overhage and Harman, INTREX, 145.
49 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” in Kochen, Growth of Knowledge, 32.
50 Overhage and Harman, INTREX, 144–45.
51 Grossman, Omnibus Copyright Revision Legislative History, 5:28.
52 Ibid., vol. 3, part 2, 97.
53 Ibid., vol. 3, part 3, 177.
54 Ibid., vol. 3, part 3, 154.
55 Ibid., 5:228–29.
56 Ibid., vol. 3, part 3, 100.
57 Ibid., vol. 3, part 2, 100.
58 Ibid., 5:197.
59 “School Mimeography and Copyright Law,” Chicago Tribune, August 18, 1964.
60 Grossman, Omnibus Copyright Revision Legislative History, 5:63–64.
61 McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work?, 163–64. McSherry makes this distinction in the context of patent law, but I think it’s relevant to copyright law as well.
62 Watson Davis, “The Universal Brain: Is Centralized Storage and Retrieval of All Knowledge Possible, Feasible, or Desirable?,” in Kochen, Growth of Knowledge, 62.
63 Colin Burke, “A Rough Road to the Information Highway. Project Intrex: A View from the CLR Archives,” Information Processing & Management 32, no. 1 (1996): 30.
64 Ibid.
4. THE INFINITE LIBRARIAN
1 Michael Stern Hart Papers, 1964–2010, University of Illinois Archives, Box 1, Folder “Essays” (hereafter cited as Hart Papers).
2 Ibid., Folder “College Material.”
3 Ibid., Box 3, Folder “Correspondence 1966–67.”
4 Ibid., Box 1, Folder “Essays.”
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., Box 3, Folder “Correspondence 1966–67.”
7 Michael Hart, “Educate Mem,” January 22, 2003, http://hart.pglaf.org/educate.mem.txt. They accepted him anyway.
8 Hart, “Educate Mem.” On the same day, he also threatened to sue one of his teachers if she blocked his admittance into an advanced math and science program.
9 Hart Papers, Box 1, Folder “Essays.”
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., Box 3, Folder “Correspondence 1966–67.”
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Hart, “Educate Mem.”
15 Hart Papers, Box 1, Folder “Life Review 1990.”
16 Ibid., Folder “Essays.”
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 “Letters of Recommendation for Michael S. Hart,” https://web.archive.org/web/20110612153429/http://promo.net/hart/letters.html.
20 “SDS: The Sigma Family,” ComputerHistory.org, http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/SDS/SDS.Sigma.1967.102646100.pdf.
21 Oxford English Dictionary.
22 Louis T. Milic, “The Next Step,” Computers and the Humanities 1, no. 1 (September 1966): 4.
23 “History of Project Gutenberg,” Project Gutenberg News, http://www.gutenbergnews.org/about/history-of-project-gutenberg/.
24 Though Michael Hart claimed that the Xerox Sigma V was connected to the ARPANET when he first encountered it, records indicate that the University of Illinois did not become an official ARPANET node until later in 1971. It is likely that the network he remembered was a local one comprised of other campus computers.
25 Hart Papers, Box 16.
26 Hart Papers, Box 7, Folder “Early Written History of P.G. c. 1980.”
27 Michael Hart to Book People mailing list, January 13, 2006, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2006&post=2006-01-13,13.
28 “History of Project Gutenberg,” Proj
ect Gutenberg News.
29 Hart Papers, Box 9, Folder “Hearing.”
30 Ibid., Box 7, Folder “Early Written History of P.G. c. 1980.”
31 “History of Project Gutenberg,” Project Gutenberg News.
32 The thirty-seven-thousand-plus number comes from Rebecca J. Rosen, “The Legacy of Project Gutenberg Founder, Michael S. Hart,” Atlantic, September 8, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-legacy-of-project-gutenberg-founder-michael-s-hart/244787/.
33 Michael Hart, “An Introduction to Michael S. Hart,” January 1, 2006, http://hart.pglaf.org/intro.me.txt.
34 Michael Hart to Book People mailing list, January 12, 2006, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2006&post=2006-01-12,3.
35 Hart Papers, Box 1, Folder “Framed Aphorisms.” Hart got the Blake quotation wrong. The actual line, from Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, reads, “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans.”
36 Hart to Book People mailing list, January 12, 2006.
37 Hart Papers, Box 6, Folder “Brainstorming Names for P.G. c. 1971.”
38 Putnam, “Great Libraries.”
39 Michael Hart, “The Cult of the Amateur,” http://hart.pglaf.org/cult.of.the.amateur.txt.
40 Hart Papers, Box 1, Folder “Essays.”
41 Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 34.
42 Licklider, Libraries of the Future, 6.
43 Williams, Free as in Freedom (2.0), 78.
44 20 GOTO 10.
45 Williams, Free as in Freedom (2.0), 54–55.
46 Hart Papers, Box 1, Folder “Journals, folder 1 of 2, 1979, 2000, undated.”
47 Richard Stallman, “The GNU Project,” www.gnu.org, http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html.
48 Ibid.
49 Richard Stallman, “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism,” www.gnu.org, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html.
50 Michael Hart, “Introduction to Michael Hart’s blog,” http://hart.pglaf.org/myblog.int.txt.
51 Hart Papers, Box 7, Folder “Project Gutenberg—Newsletters 1991–92.”
52 Ibid., Box 1, Folder “Essays.”
53 Ibid., Box 3, Folder “Correspondence 1974–1985.”
54 Ibid., Box 9, Folder “Hymen Hart and Alice Woodby, c. 1975.”
55 Ibid., Box 1, Folder “Life Review 1990.”
56 Ibid., Box 8, Folder “Duncan Research—Correspondence 1987–90.”
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., Folder “Geof Pawlicki Folder 1 of 2 1987–88, 1992.”
59 Ibid., Box 1, Folder “Life Review 1990.”
The Idealists Page 29