John Dickson's Sea-Posts
Does anybody know how to obtain a copy of John Dickson's The Atlantic Sea-Posts of the Cape of Good Hope to 1883?
The work is distributed on a memory stick in a CD cover. Unfortunately, my copy of the memory stick ceased to function.
Can anybody help?
Thanks
Sadly I don't have a copy, I have been looking how to get it for sometime as well, as I won some lots when Dickson's collection was auctioned. He had a series of articles in the Cape and Natal Study circle journal. Please if you manage to get a copy will you let us know how to obtain one as well?
yannisl
I have managed to replace my failed CD of Dickson's Atlantic Sea-Posts of the Cape of Good Hope. However, it i kind a problem since the work is subject to copyright so I don't like to post a direct link on this site. However please contact me directly and I may be able to do something.
In the meanwhile - somebody that knew John and perhaps his family could obtain a permission to post the study for all interested to access. It would be a great source for the postal historians.
Peter
Thanks Peter. Please check email.
Gents
Please note that the copyright notice is very permissive, pretty very much like Wikipedia:
Permission is granted to reproduce the whole or part of this work for personal and educational use only. Commercial copying, distribution, hiring, lending is prohibited.
Yes that's correct. However, it does not give us the right to distribute/post the work on this or any other website for general access. The author (or estate/family) retains the copyright for is it 75 years before it may goes into the public domain. The ideal copyright clause would have been a creative commons attribution (CC-BY 4.0 license; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This would have permitting free redistribution and reproduction for any purpose, even commercial, provided proper citation of the original work. Author(s) would still retain copyright. This type is becoming common and probably ideal for most of the writings we are doing as collectors. Am I right?
But besides, for the present publication it would still be a problems to get access to it in the first hand. Apparently, only a selected handful of collectors managed to obtain a copy from John before he died. In addition, it appears that only one of the major philatelic libraries have a copy. The APRL does not. But the library of the RPSL have a copy that they wisely have uploaded to their server. Unfortunately, they are not able to give access to that posting due to copyright issues. Rightly, I think, the work can only be accessed by showing up in London and asking to see it. As those of us that have seen the work (>1,000 pages), it would not be possible to extract information during a short visit to the library.
Another issue is, as I experienced, that the CD is not very stable and malfunctions easily. So even you may have a copy - it may not really be there when needed.
It would be ideal if somebody could get permission from the estate/family to post the work on an accessible website. Perhaps ideally also permission to distribute it in a physical format.
Any suggestions?
Peter
Attached is the CD cover
Uploaded files:
Hope that I will be forgiven.
But here is a scanned copy of the folder included with Dickson's CD.
p
Uploaded files:Thanks
We have sent an email to the philatelic executor of John's estate. Hoping to get an answer back in a few days. CDs are always problematic. Some years back I bought the full London Philatelist on CDs and the CDs are failing. Same with many other CDs. Nothing beats a hard copy + soft copy. So getting the right permissions are important.
By the way I have many of the covers illustrated in the book related to the Cape of Good Hope, if they can be of help to anyone I can provide scans.
It is tragic that John crossed the rainbow bridge, as well as Robert. John wrote me an email back in 2006, that his was planning three books...
(a) The Sea-Posts of the Cape of Good Hope, (b) The Postal
History of Natal, and (c) The Postage Stamps of Natal. In that order.
Each of these will be more thoroughly researched than any current
publication. The Natal & Zululand Post has been a vehicle (to be
continued in the Cape & Natal PJ) for setting out chapters of these
proposed book...
He deserves to have his book distributed more widely.