The Sweet Public Domain: Celebrating Copyright Expiration with the Honey Bunch Series

Authors

Sara Benson (ed)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kaylen Dwyer (ed)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21900/wd.11

Synopsis

The Sweet Public Domain: Celebrating Copyright Expiration with the Honey Bunch Series is a celebration of the reinstatement of public domain day on January 1, 2019, after a twenty-year hiatus due to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This digital collection features a republication of the children’s book series Honey Bunch, which began publication in 1923, supported by essays on the book series, copyright and the public domain. The Honey Bunch series follows the adventures of four-year-old Honey Bunch, along with cat Lady Clare and doll Eleanor, as the child encounters a succession of firsts—her first visit to the city, her first days on the farm, her first little garden, her first visit to the seashore, and more. Accompanying essays provide an introduction to and history of the series, exploring its themes of domesticity, materialism, and childhood bliss within the context of the Great Depression, girls’ series books, and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. The collection is rounded off by essays on copyright and the public domain in celebration of the impact of the end of extended copyright terms on the collective imagination.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Kaylen Dwyer
  • The Sweet, Sweet Public Domain
    Sara Benson
  • Allow Me to Rain on Your Public Domain Parade
    Kirby Ferguson
  • Works Entering the Public Domain
    Kaylen Dwyer
  • Just a Little Bestselling Series: An Introduction to the Stratemeyer Syndicate's Honey Bunch Series
    LuElla D'Amico
  • Honey Bunch: Creation and History of the Series
    Deidre Johnson
  • Honey Bunch: Just a Little Girl
    Helen Louise Thorndyke
  • Honey Bunch: Her First Visit to the City
    Helen Louise Thorndyke
  • Honey Bunch: Her First Days on the Farm
    Helen Louise Thorndyke
  • Honey Bunch: Her First Visit to the Seashore
    Helen Louise Thorndyke
  • Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden
    Helen Louise Thorndyke

Author Biographies

Sara Benson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sara Benson is the Copyright Librarian and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Library at Urbana Champaign. She holds a JD from the University of Houston Law Center, an LLM from Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley, and an MSLIS from the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the Library, Sara was a Lecturer at the University of Illinois College of Law for ten years. Sara is the host of the Podcast ©hat (“Copyright Chat”) available on iTunes. Her recent research interests include working a large-scale project studying how to effectively teach fair use doctrine to librarians. This study was published in the spring issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship. The goal of her research agenda is to “shape the future of copyright policy by examining both on-the-ground practice in libraries and museums as well as the sociopolitical guiding principles behind such practices.”

Kaylen Dwyer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kaylen Dwyer is an MSLIS student at the U of I and a graduate assistant for the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing. She has served on editorial boards for SourceLab and Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, and was senior editor of Taylor University's undergraduate literary journal, Parnassus. As part of the team for The Sweet Public Domain, Kaylen was responsible for gathering the materials for the exhibit, editing the texts, custom coding, and graphic design. 

Helen Louise Thorndyke

Like many series books published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, The Honey Bunch series was written under a pseudonym. All works were collected under the name “Helen Louise Thorndyke,” with Josephine Lawrence responsible for the first sixteen volumes (1923-1936).

Josephine Lawrence (c. 1889-1978), American novelist and journalist, began her career ghostwriting children’s series fiction but went on to gain national recognition for her adult fiction. Over the course of her career, she penned 33 adult novels and over 100 children’s books.

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Published

February 17, 2020
Copyright (c) 2020 Sara Benson, Kaylen Dwyer, editorial content; individual chapter copyrights by their contributors. Text of Honey Bunch series books in the public domain and not protected by copyright.

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Details about this monograph

ISBN-13 (15)

978-1-946011-08-4

Date of first publication (11)

2020-02-01