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Who Owns the Undead? Dracula, Nosferatu, and Copyright was created in the months of August and September of 2019, and displayed throughout the month of October, 2019.
Exhibit Makeup:
The exhibit was made up of three posters, three novelty items related to the vampire, one board game, two 3D-printed vampire figures, and a dozen books about the vampire.
One poster contained information regarding the legal battle between Florence Balcombe and Prana Films, the wife of Dracula’s author, Bram Stoker, and the company responsible for the creation of Nosferatu, respectively. This information was taken from chapter two of David Skal’s book, Hollywood Gothic: Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. After emailing Skal, I learned he retrieved the information in this chapter from a series of letters between Balcombe and the British Incorporated Society of Authors. These letters, he stated, are held in the British Library Archives and Manuscripts. Information from this poster can be found on another post on this virtual exhibit.
The second poster discussed the value of public domain resources. Additional resources regarding the public domain can be found on Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Copyright Reference Guide, and discussions with Emory University’s Copyright Librarian.
I was surprised that several of the items in our collection had connections to the vampire, seeing as MacMillan is a law library. This was a good opportunity to purchase some additional items for our collection. Because the exhibit was designed to focus on the copyright case itself, I did not have concerns regarding the inclusion of my own books in the collection. I had also discussed with the head of Collections Services if purchasing any items students expressed interest in would be feasible, and was told it was, so any concerns that may have arisen regarding the collection were resolved.
Some of the items in this display were purchased by the law library for the purpose of this display, including a few books for our collection, but many items, like the Dracula plush, came from my personal collection of vampiric materials.
Novelty items included a vampire-themed PEZ dispenser won in a raffle at PCA Washington D.C. in 2019, one VHS recording of Scooby-Doo: A Halloween Hassle in Dracula’s Castle, and a plush Dracula. Including these items in the exhibit case not only added a fun flair to the case itself, but also provided visible examples of how Dracula as a character has been used and reused since his inception into the public domain.
This exhibit also includes two, 3D printed vampire models, which are discussed in the ‘Recreating This Exhibit” post on this blog.