On copyright and some scanned books

[mcbishop]

This week I was lucky enough to get a copy of Jessie Mothesole's The Saxon Shore from Ebay. Now, our Jessie was a rather interesting character: a watercolourist who wrote several accounts of her journeys to look at Roman monuments in Britain, including Hadrian's Wall, the Saxon Shore forts, and Agricola's road into Scotland. She would walk, cycle, cadge a lift, whatever it took to pursue her goal. On the way she chatted, painted, and provided an informed account of what she found. She knew what she was talking about too: she seemingly knew all the 'greats' of 1920s Romano-British archaeology.

Now although she wrote most of her books in the 1920s, she didn't die until 1958, so all her books are still in copyright in the UK, however that doesn't appear to stop at least one of her archaeological travelogues appearing as a scanned copy on the web. Hosted by the Internet Archive, scanned from the collections of Canadian libraries, her volume on Hadrian's Wall is available to browse, download, or whatever. Maria Hoyer's account of her journey along the Wall in 1907 is there too, as is George McDonald's Roman Wall in Scotland. And who is sponsoring this scanning? Er, Microsoft. Hmmm. Now I am puzzled.

Still, since at least the Mothersole and McDonald volumes are still in copyright I shan't tell you about them, just in case you are led astray. There now: I've saved you all from becoming criminals... allegedly ;-)

Mike Bishop

[Tarbicus]

Thanks for the link, Mike. My digital library just increased by roughly forty five books.