File talk:Fancy dresses described, or, What to wear at fancy balls (1887).djvu

Concerning the licensing of this work

This work, is considered to have been published in the UK prior to 1923 under a pseudonym.

1. I attempted to find a date of death of the Ardern Holt, but could find very little information on them online.
2. In a reference desk thread here (see: Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities#Identifying_an_author it was suggested that the name might in fact be a pseduonym.
3. If it's a puesdonym - Section 57 of the releavnt UK act ( http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48 ) can be reasonably applied,
4. The work is published in 1877, outside the US (So can reasonably be regarded as PD in the US as being published before 1923)
5. A search on the UK 1911 census, for the name Ardern Holt, did not produce an exact match.
6. A soruce source listed in the refdesk thread indicates that Ardern Holt wrote a column in a magazine called "Queen" (which later merged with another to become the UK version of "Harpers Bazzar".) The sources say they were active from 1866 to 1916. If it's one person, assuming they started writing when around 20 (they may have started earlier or later given the start date), that would suggest them being 70 or so in 1916. On those calculations they would have been about 80 in 1926, meaning that they would be around 98 in 1944. Whilst it's not implausible for someone from the 1840's to be alive in 1944, I'm reasonably confident that seems unlikely, the actual death being sometime between 1916 and 1946 (when on the above they'd be 100)
7. If the Ardern Holt is a byline (used by more than one staff writer), within reasonable bounds it might not be possible to find the exact 'Ardern Holt' concerned with the 1877 edition.
8. The publisher is "Debenham and Freebody" (they later became the Debenhams chain in the UK), so given the 1877 version was published under their auspices. If they are regarded as the creator (the other's identity not known) then it may be a work-for-hire (albiet with a credit to an author wjpse identity at present can't be identified.)
9. The 1877 edition here, lists no additional credit for the illustrator, meaning that they are also unidentified.

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 09:47, 3 October 2014 (UTC)