When we were very young
A collection of poems reflecting the experiences of a little English boy growing up in the early part of the twentieth century.
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- Here you are: https://www.waterstones.com/book/when-we-were-very-young/a-a...
Took less than 30 seconds.
- But the original book included the quoted Milne text and Shepard illustrations, so now neither Hoff nor Penguin nor anyone else has the rights to publish it. Reproducing the Milne text might reasonably fall within the ambit of fair use, but the use of the Shepard illustrations would be much more difficult to defend legally.
Christopher Robin Milne himself died at age 75 a quarter-century ago, never ceasing to deplore the commercialization of his father's work ("climbing upon my infant shoulders"). His daughter Clare died in 02012. Disgracefully, I think that some of the Milne and Shepard work is still in copyright; The House at Pooh Corner wasn't published until 01928, and even Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 01926. The only Pooh material published early enough to be in the US public domain is the poem from When we Were Very Young. I think that in two and a half months Winnie-the-Pooh goes into the public domain in the US, but the other remains locked up until 02024. I'm not sure about, for example, the UK; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926477 says in the UK it's locked up until 02027, which happens to be 15 years after Milne's last living descendant perished.
If Hoff is still alive in 02024, perhaps he will—by virtue of having outlived A.A. Milne by 68 years, almost four human generations—finally win the legal right to comment freely on the spiritual dimensions of Milne's work.
- My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week:
> Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her
Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-year-old-content that way?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young [1] It was first published in 1924
