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Originally Posted by GA Russell
Thom, well, my experience with heirs has involved older downtown buildings used for commercial purposes. The heirs were much easier to deal with than real estate developers.
If you have experience with heirs of orphan works, please tell us all about it!
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Talk to people in the SF field. There are an assortment of works that haven't been re-issued because the estate has an exaggerated idea of how much the property is worth, and demands reprint fees no one is willing to pay.
An apposite example is the late H. Beam Piper. He committed suicide in 1961. His work was out of print for several decades because his widow had an inflated idea of the value. Ace Books finally secured the rights and reprinted a good bit of it (save some collaborations he had done with another author.)
An old friend of mine is proprietor of a small press, and has been returning some out-of-print works to publication in collector's editions. He was talking to Ace about doing limited edition collector's hardcovers. Ace was willing enough, since he wouldn't be competing with the paperback editions they were doing, but their rights and permissions people were tied up on other things and couldn't get to the paperwork at that time. The next thing we knew, Piper's work had entered the public domain, and all save one book that Ace apparently had renewed rights on started appearing at Project Gutenberg.
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Dennis