A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.

Finding a legal resolution to the orphan issue is even more urgent in new media, where there are only decades, rather than centuries, to intervene before a work decays past any hope of restoration. An experimental program to grant individual licenses for the use of orphan works was launched last year in Canada, and may provide an example of how this can be made a standard feature of copyright law worldwide.

The one on the left is Alexander Graham Bell, and on the right is his dad Melville. The Bell family emigrated from Scotland to Canada, and Melville stayed behind when A.G. moved to the U.S. When AT&T was founded, Melville ran its Canadian branch, Bell Canada, which remained part of AT&T until its antitrust breakup in 1956.

1. John Rockefeller – $192 billion – oil
2. Cornelius Vanderbilt – $143 billion – steamboats -> railroads
3. John Astor – $116 billion – fur -> real estate
4. Stephen Girard – $83 billion – smuggling -> banking
5. Bill Gates – $82 billion – software
6. Andrew Carnegie – $74 billion – steel
7. A. T. Stewart – $70 billion – retail
8. Frederick Weyerhauser – $68 billion – lumber
9. Jay Gould – $67 billion – stocks
10. Stephen van Rensselaer – $64 billion – real estate
11. Marshall Field – $61 billion – retail -> real estate
12. Henry Ford – $54 billion – cars
13. Sam Walton – $53 billion – retail -> outsourcing
14. Andrew Mellon – $48 billion – banking -> aluminum, oil
15. Richard Mellon – $48 billion – banking -> aluminum, oil
16. Warren Buffett – $46 billion – stocks
17. James Fair – $45 billion – mining -> real estate
18. William Weightman – $44 billion – pharmaceuticals
19. Moses Taylor – $44 billion – banking
20. Russell Sage – $43 billion – organized crime -> stocks
21. John Blair – $43 billion – mining -> railroads
22. Edward Harriman – $39 billion – stocks -> railroads
23. Henry Rogers – $39 billion – oil
24. J. P. Morgan – $38 billion – banking -> politics
25. Oliver Payne – $37 billion – oil
26. Henry Frick – $36 billion – steel
27. George Pullman – $34 billion – traincars
28. Collis Huntington – $33 billion – retail -> railroads
29. Peter Widener – $32 billion – railroads
30. James Flood – $31 billion – mining

By the way, Huntington, WV is named for Collis Huntington. And Oliver Hazard Payne easily takes the prize for best name.

“It’s not at all clear that we’ve won the Cold War. Probably, we and the U.S.S.R. lost it, but they lost it first and harder because they were always poorer than we were.”

This inspired me to go looking for other stuff on Johnson, which led me to a second, equally good article of his. Here, he elaborates on the same idea, arguing that we face a stark choice similar to that of the postwar British Empire. Heavily damaged by the Nazi invasion, Britain no longer had the resources to maintain military control over its colonies. It could either impose tyranny at home and extract the missing wealth from its own citizens–or it could voluntarily give up the empire, accept a reduction in its global influence, and use the dividends of peace to rebuild itself.

He quotes Hannah Arendt:

“On the whole [the British Empire] was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state’s legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that ‘administrative massacres’ could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.”

In this one, he explores the common ancestry of Germanic languages by first learning some phrases in Old English and then visiting the Netherlands to try them out on a Frisian Dutch person.

(direct link)

An underground economy quickly developed with ice as the pinnacular commodity. “People are fighting over ice!” she yelled into the phone. “I mean fist fights — right in the parking lots!”

“What are they doing with the ice?” I asked.

“It’s hot!” she cried.

“But the power’s out, so it will just melt in a few hours — right? Seems like ice would be a luxury item compared to food and just regular old water.”

“You don’t understand: WE NEED THAT ICE!” She cried. “Some of Germaine’s friends brought us ice from Naples in the back of their car” — such a trans-state delivery, I should point out, requires a three hour drive — “and when they got to our parking lot, people were clamoring to buy the ice from them before they got it up the stairs. This morning, David went to the store and there were police guarding the ice. They have to keep the hordes away. They’re scalping it in some places — for twenty bucks a pound!”

The extent to which order was deteriorating was surprising:

“Yeah — there was a truck coming down to Palm Beach with those army meals and some water, and it was hijacked. Taken before it got here.” Thus had Frances created modern-day brigandry right in the middle of suburban Florida.

Still, the post ends on a positive note, with the sort of heartwarming tale of neighborly generosity that we heard so much after the recent New York outage.

It’s not just the odd unfamiliar word (I had to google minatory, “foreshadowing evil,” and causerie, “idle conversation”).

It’s not the somewhat short-sighted cultural commentary:

“This drives yet another nail into the coffin lid, already well hammered down, of Marshall McLuhan’s theory that TV has transformed the world into a global village. (Radio is, as it has long been, the only medium that gives us immediate access to what the rest of the planet is doing and thinking, simply because every country of any size operates a foreign-language service.)”

It’s not even the pre-New-World-Order reference to how baseball fandom “annexed Japan.”

Now that I think about it, it’s really just that the author uses the word “digital” to mean “relating to the fingers.” It took me about thirty full seconds to parse that sentence. You try:

” I note the digital mannerisms (befitting one who began his career as a conjurer) that he uses to hold our attention during his patter. “

See?

But–I’ve never heard this before–there’s a much more sinister aspect to the creaky old thing. Electoral points (calling them “votes” is a bit anachronistic) are awarded based on the total number of potential voters, not the number of votes actually cast. This means, in practice, that the system is in fact weighted not as much in favor of small states, but in favor of populous states with large non-voting populations. In other words–the former Confederacy.