I’m looking for some really terrible literature for a project, and i’d like to use stuff in the public domain. Can anyone recommend some stuff you’d never recommend? Stuff on the level of My Immortal, except i’m pretty sure that one is protected.
‘HO, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus tonight?’ said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb.
‘Alas, no! dear Clodius; he has not invited me,’ replied Diomed, a man of portly frame and of middle age. ‘By Pollux, a scurvy trick! for they say his suppers are the best in Pompeii’.
Thanks!
I’ve read a lot of books, personally, professionally, and in education.
The worst public domain book I can recall is “The Art of War in the Middle Ages”. It is the epitome of “Some works should not be set aside lightly, they should be thrown with great force!”
A sample:
"The Teutonic nation of North-Western Europe did not–like the Goths and Lombards–owe their victories to the strength of their mail-clad cavalry. The Franks and Saxons of the sixth and seventh centuries were still infantry. It would appear that the moors of North Germany and Schleswig, and the heaths and marshes of Belgium, were less favourable to the growth of cavalry than the steppes of the Ukraine or the plains of the Danube valley. The Frank, as pictured to us by Sidonius Apollinaris, Procopius, and Agathias, still bore a considerable resemblance to his Sigambrian ancestors. Like them he was destitute of helmet and body-armour; his shield, however, had become a much more effective defence than the wicker framework of the first century: it was a solid oval with a large iron boss and rim. The ‘framea’ had now been superseded by the ‘angon’–‘a dart neither very long nor very short, which can be used against the enemy either by grasping it as a pike or hurling it16.’ The iron of its head extended far down the shaft; at its ‘neck’ were two barbs, which made its extraction from a wound or a pierced shield almost impossible. The ‘francisca,’ however, was the great weapon of the people from whom it derived its name. It was a single-bladed battle-axe17, with a heavy head composed of a long blade curved on its outer face and deeply hollowed in the interior. It was carefully weighted, so that it could be used, like an American tomahawk, for hurling at the enemy. The skill with which the Franks discharged this weapon, just before closing with the hostile line, was extraordinary, and its effectiveness made it their favourite arm. A sword and dagger (‘scramasax’) completed the normal equipment of the warrior; the last was a broad thrusting blade, 18 inches long, the former a two-edged cutting weapon of about 2½ feet in length.
Such was the equipment of the armies which Theodebert, Buccelin, and Lothair led down into Italy in the middle of the sixth century. Procopius informs us that the first-named prince brought with him some cavalry; their numbers, however, were insignificant, a few hundreds in an army of 90,000 men. They carried the lance and a small round buckler, and served as a body-guard round the person of the king. Their presence, though pointing to a new military departure among the Franks, only serves to show the continued predominance of infantry in their armies."
A digital archive of (now) PD works might suffer selection bias. I suspect it would take a remarkably broad minded archivist to archive utterly trash literature (rather than just letting it fade away).
