{"id":270,"date":"2007-04-11T10:38:05","date_gmt":"2007-04-11T17:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thepulp.net\/PulpBlogs\/YellowedPerils_test\/?p=270"},"modified":"2007-04-11T10:38:05","modified_gmt":"2007-04-11T17:38:05","slug":"profits-and-preservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/2007\/04\/11\/profits-and-preservation\/","title":{"rendered":"Profits and preservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sad to report that The Avenger Archives<\/a> is no more. David Kalb<\/strong> reports that he received a cease-and-desist e-mail from Conde Nast\u2019s lawyers.<\/p>\n

His is the first new site taken down since Blackmask.com about a year ago and those Web sites that received the first round of cease-and-desist letters several years ago.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Avenger Archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An attorney for Sabin, Bermant & Gould wrote David that \u201cyou have posted, without permission, many Avenger stories and back stories from The Avenger<\/em><\/a> and The Shadow<\/em><\/a> magazines in .txt and .pdf formats. In addition, you have posted, without permission, the cover and interior artwork from many of these novels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Granted, companies such as Conde Nast (which owns the Street and Smith<\/a> rights) has every right to protect their intellectual property<\/a>, in this case, the artwork and short stories that were posted at The Avenger Archives. They own the material, period.<\/p>\n

But my greatest fear for thousands of pulp stories is that they will simply disappear without someone preserving them. Take the back stories, those secondary features that filled out the magazine around the main novel. The first issue of The Avenger<\/em> hit the newsstands nearly 68 years ago. It, as all the other pulp magazines, was printed on extremely cheap newsprint that was intended to last only until the next issue came out. Two-thirds of a century later, how many of those individual magazines remain? Out of the 100,000 or so printed, would the survivors number in the tens? Or, if we’re lucky, the hundreds?<\/p>\n

We saw the entire run of The Avenger<\/em> novels reprinted nearly a quarter century ago. (And they proved quite popular at the time.) But what about stories such as Arthur J. Burks<\/a>\u2019 \u201cThe Firecracker,\u201d which was a back story in the first issue of The Avenger<\/em>? Three other short stories also appeared in that issue. Will they ever be officially reprinted?<\/p>\n

The Avenger Archive provided downloads of the back stories and illustrations from The Avenger<\/em> pulps, but not the actual main novels themselves. (The Avenger short stories which appeared in other magazines after The Avenger<\/em> was canceled were also available. They had not been officially reprinted since their original appearances.)<\/p>\n

Other than David\u2019s efforts, what is being done to preserve those stories? Or the four short stories in the next issue? Or the next issue? Or the thousands of stories that appear in the thousands of vanishing pulp magazines? What value are rights if you no longer have the content that you own the rights to?<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s hope that the copyright holders, including Conde Nast, are actively pursuing the preservation of the content \u2014 text and art \u2014 of their pulp magazine back issues so that future generations will be able to enjoy all of the works they own, not just the two or three most profitable ones.<\/p>\n

Otherwise, a significant portion of America\u2019s literary history will simply crumble to dust in the next few decades. And we\u2019ll all be poorer for that.<\/p>\n

\u2013\u00a0William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sad to report that The Avenger Archives is no more. David Kalb reports that he received a cease-and-desist e-mail from Conde Nast\u2019s lawyers. His is the first new site taken down since Blackmask.com about a year ago and those Web sites that received the first round of cease-and-desist letters several years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[16,8,19,11,15],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-opinion","category-pulppreservation","category-pulps","category-websites"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2qgXO-4m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}