Give Me Liberty: Old Trove Newly Up for Sale
by Calvin Reid, PW NewsLine -- Publishers Weekly, 1/26/2005
ZelnickMedia, a New York media holding company specializing in revitalizing dormant brands, is betting it can turn an huge archive of classic American writers and public figures--with all rights intact--into a gold mine of publishing, film and TV projects.
The archive contains the 1300-issue run of Liberty magazine, a weekly news and entertainment journal like Colliers or Saturday Evening Post which published between 1924 and 1950 and which boasted a circulation of more than 3 million readers weekly. The archive holds more than 17,000 copyrighted fiction and nonfiction materials ranging from short stories to condensed novels, essays and much else by writers like James Cain, Ring Lardner and Richard Wright.
Arthur Klebanoff of the Scott Meredith Agency is representing the archive to the publishing industry and L.A.-based Intellectual Properties Worldwide is negotiating film and TV deals. The key to this trove of material, according to Klebanoff, are the rights. "Almost without exception," says Klebanoff, Liberty's records and copyright renewals "were impeccably maintained. It's all protected. This is rather unusual."--Calvin Reid
