I would have been happy to pay a reasonable fee. Instead, they get **NOTHING**. There is legally no requirement and, if they sued, while a PIA, it would be dismissed early on. BOO!
Thanks to the Wikipedian who annotated this Popular Science cover noting that they had done their research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Popsci7.jpg#:~:text=The%20title%20was%20shortened%20to,still%20published%20today%20(2008).&text=Works%20copyrighted%20before%201964%20had,is%20in%20the%20public%20domain. Forgetting to renew a copyright was common. Because most organizations didn't see a value except for reprints of books or for films, typically, in the time and money to track and renew. Now copyright is inherent and carries life + 75 years in the U.S. For more on that https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
For those interested in the article in question, someone else digitized it in 2016 and posted it on their site: http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-making-of-funny-by-george-mcmanus.html I will try to make a higher-res scan, turn it into a PDF, and then upload to Internet Archive or some such.
@bb1a99d2 So many details to flesh out. The Ben Day screen looks like a serigraphy, silk screen. Different angles for each color? Different screens for each percentage?
@13d743bf Yes, I've got tables of Ben Day screens and patterns: some for negatives, some for positives. It's very much like silkscreen in one sense, but different in another: instead of sluicing ink through a stencil, the Ben Day screens have raised dots that are inked. The screen is placed above the plate, negative, or original, and an engraver burnishes from the top. Masking on the transfer limits dot coverage to unmasked areas.