Public Domain Roundup 2026

Let’s get this year started on the right foot (well, as right as we can get given the Circumstances) with more art liberated from the shackles of copyright. All this shit is yours now, do with it as you will.

This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list by any stretch (check out Public Domain Review, Duke University, the Smithsonian, and Wikipedia for more), and will be shaped, as always, by my own foppery and whim.

• Important reminder 1: The public domain elements of a long-running series extend only up to the point of expiry, so characters, plot elements, and whatnot from an installment in 1931 or later are still under copyright (if that story hasn’t fallen out of copyright through other means). Estates love abusing this (“Holmes can’t show emotions yet, that’s still under copyright!”).
• Important reminder 2: Trademarks cover branding, and many of the rights-holders are real bastards about things like names and costumes and whatnot. So it’s in your best interest to shake things up a little & put your fingerprint on your version of the character (makes for better derivatives, anyway)

Anyway, let’s get rolling.

Nancy Drew

Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, The Bungalow Mystery and The Mystery at Lilac Inn are all good to go (in their 1930 versions, not the 1959-1960 reprints). Any PD use of Nancy would have to be based on the contents of just these four works, which probably is in everyone’s benefit because you’ve got less to wade through and it’s yet to become set in its ways.

Relevant: We’re also now up to the first 9 Hardy Boys books. Honestly we are spoiled for choice when it comes to detectives, most of the big names of the era are PD now.

Adaptation: The great thing about a plucky teenage detective is that you can toss them in basically any story with a mystery element and it'll work out fine: Nancy tracking down the rare book thief who stole from the Miskatonic University special collection, for example. Plenty of room for moving her around in time or writing her at different stages of her life, as well: book came out in 1930, Nancy is 16 in it, so she was born in 1913-1914 and so you could feasibly set her anywhere up to the late 90s early 00s if you took this route. (I like this method a lot; rooting the characters in time and place allows you to bring all that historical context to bear.)

Miss Marple

Now, Miss Marple is technically already PD because she first appeared in some short stories in 1927, but those got republished in Thirteen Problems in 1932 so trying to track down the originals will likely be a pain and a half. Anyway, Murder at the Vicarage hit PD this year, and it’s going to be the only one for another 12 years.

Adaptation: Crossover with Nancy Drew, obviously, could get a fun mentor-student dynamic out of that. 

 

The Burroughs Corner

1930 gets us both A Fighting Man of Mars as well as Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s seven Barsoom novels, 13 Tarzan novels, three Pellucidar novels, and one extremely litigious estate that’s never let the reality of copyright law get in the way of picking at a warmed-over exquisite corpse. They’ll let you read the stuff on Gutenberg but heaven forbid you come within nine miles of their trademarks.

Adaptation: Given the quite repetitive nature of these series, adaptations have their work cut out for them as either "just steal the monsters and whatnot and plug them into something else" or "massively overhaul the entire thing into some drastically new form", or some mix between the two. The latter is a safer bulwark against the vulture estate, as it's much more difficult to claim infringement of trademark when there's no way anyone could confuse the derivative work with the original. 

Last and First Men

I read this one last year, and had some sizable thoughts on it: mainly that it was extremely inspiring in those moments when it was not extremely frustrating or dull. It’s a canvas to work from / lego box to loot, not so much something to adapt directly: science has indeed marched on and Stapledon’s knowledge of astronomical, evolutionary and social science is very much limited by time, place and circumstance. Expect a post about this in the future, I’ve been percolating thoughts.

Adaptation: The weirdo future posthumans are the highlight of the work, but they're also something that needs a good bit of elbow grease to use. It's not really a plug and play if you want to do it justice.

Golden Bat

He’s a gold skeleton with a sword and a sick cape. Life goals, certainly, but also part of a cool storytelling tradition that I had only heard about in the lead up to writing about this post.

Golden Bat started in kamishibai, which was a type of street performance during the Depression and post-War period where the storyteller would perform with a little stage they could slot pictures into: it’s basically an analogue PowerPoint party, where you’re ad-libbing something funny with the slides you have available. Absolutely fascinating, definitely worth including wherever it can fit (and of course, include the Golden Bat)

Adaptation: There have been several movie, manga, and anime adaptations, none of which are PD. (Golden Bat being from Atlantis is from this later version). Best play it safe and just have the gold skeleton with a sword and sick cape and work from there. You don't need lore, it's Golden Bat!

Other Noteworthies

• All Quiet on the Western Front (film version)
• As I Lay Dying (plus several Faulkner shorts)
• The Maltese Falcon (book only)
• Rover the dog (he doesn't become Pluto until later)
• Flip the Frog (from Fiddlesticks, first color cartoon with sound)
• Betty Boop ("Dizzy Dishes" only, so she's still in weird dog-hybrid mode) 
• Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (Piet Mondrian) 
• The Sun God's Children (Good writeup here) 
• Folk Tales of All Nations (Good writeup here, same blog as above)

 

** 

Something I've noticed in my occasional visits to r/publicdomain is a trend that a lot of people, when dealing with PD material, seem stuck in Franchise Brain. They want The Thing as a discrete intellectual property, maintaining the shape of what came before - which is fine, though I find it disappointing. PD allows for its contents to be disseminated as part of collective culture, unbound from the strictures of who gets to use what or how they use it. You can just have a sailor named Popeye show up in something else, you don't need to make a New Popeye Thing Featuring Famous Character Popeye. PD detaches the ideas from the source so that those ideas are no longer tied down to a single specific execution or iteration. Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head. 

Anyway, all this is still just a starting point. Doubtlessly I will find some more that I've missed (or be reminded of them), and I've got some other PD goodies (Leslie Stone project included) in the works. In a world where the powers that be are trying to own information itself via Azathoth's idiot plagiarist brother, circulating the tapes like this brings at least a little peace of mind.