A New Line in 2025
2024 was, admittedly, a very slow year for iktaPOP, mostly due to external factors.
2025 will, likewise, not be a year of rapid releases – although we do hope to make January and February interesting. It is the year that everything published in the USA in 1929 indisputably ascends to the public domain, and that will be celebrated.
Past the first two months, the pulp will continue to flow, albeit intermittently, due to editing (and writing) obligations. But there will be something else, something which I had intended from the very outset of iktaPOP, but up to now has had no follow-through.
Nonfiction is coming. There are at least two, possibly three, threads that the nonfiction line will follow.
The first thread is liberty. (Try to contain your shock.) These will be books by great libertarian, classical liberal, and other freedom-oriented thinkers. Some will be in the line of education, others will be more closely tied to self-help (there will be one book by a man who, in a scene no fiction author could get away with, discovered the book Self-Help, by Samuel Smiles no less, in an attic, and was inspired to create books to encourage other people toward success.)
The second thread, closely tied to the first, will be books aimed at homeschoolers and anyone interested in self-education. In time, these will include books on grammar, rhetoric, logic, the history of philosophy, and more. Some of these will be more work on my end than others, and two of them I'm experimenting with using AsciiDoc as the source format, rather than my usual Markdown.
The final thread — and this one may wait for a later time because, even though it's part of what got me into doing public domain books in the first place, it is the lowest urgency — is simply "books that catch my interest", typified by a history of a city I love, published in the 1920s.
Back in the pulp domain, there will be a few authors who will be getting a more comprehensive treatment than I've done to date. The Complete Works of Charles Cloukey is coming, in a single volume (given that he died at nineteen years old, it's actually impressive that the single volume will be as long as it is). If I can track down sources for a few things I've not yet found, a first volume of the complete works of Georges Surdez should appear. (That depends on sourcing, of course, so it may take longer.) And an early SF author will get a "The Chronological Works Of..." series beginning, though not a "complete works", because he lived to the late 1960s, and published a few things near the end that remain in copyright. The first volume will cover 1928 and 1929, which may sound slight, but covers one substantial novel, and enough novellas to count as at least two more novels going by pure wordcount.
In addition, I just recently discovered that several non-Conan early sword and sorcery stories are in the public domain. So there will be a few collections along those lines, coming, too.
As ever, 2025 looks like it's going to be "too much to do, not enough time or focus to do it".