: Republishing public domain work by family ancestors Both my husband's great grandfather and, on my side, my own great-great grandfather were published authors. Their books appear on the Bibliobazaar/Open

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I'm not a legal expert, but my belief is that you can reprint anything in the public domain, but you cannot newly copyright it. Typically, when older works are reprinted, the publisher adds scholarly notes, a new introduction, new illustrations, or other material that can be copyrighted (for example, The Annotated Alice). If it is really in the public domain, you will not need permission from the repositories, nor should you need to retype (unless they added their own copyrighted material to the original).

As far as best method of republishing, that really is a separate question, that has been addressed elsewhere here. It really depends on what your aims are. If the work is of general interest, and you have added solid supplemental materials, you might consider a traditional publisher, perhaps one that specializes in older work. If you are expecting it to be only of interest to your immediate family, Print-On-Demand is probably your best bet.

A note of caution: if you are expecting this to be an income source for your family, that is highly unlikely, unless your ancestors were famous (in which case someone would probably have already re-released their work). You're probably going to be most happy with this process if you view it as doing a service to your ancestors, by keep their work alive, rather than as a way to build up a nest egg for your kids.

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