Dover Publications
Free public domain sheet music from IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library
Dover Publications, founded in 1941, is an American publishing company specializing in out-of-print (and commonly public domain) titles of many genres, including classical music scores. Most of their (rather substantial) music collection is reprints of scores of public domain works, notably Breitkopf & Härtel among others; consequently, much of their collection is in the public domain.
- Haydn. Sonatas in two volumes. Reprint of the 1918 Breitkopf & Härtel Gesamtausgabe edition, edited by Päsler.
- Schubert. Complete Chamber Music for Strings. Reprint of 1890 Breitkopf & Härtel Gesammtausgabe edition, edited by Eusebius Mandyczewski & Joseph Hellmesberger.
How to recognize a Dover print
Dover reprints are fairly easily recognizable. Google books let you have a look in sample pages of Dover prints, so that you can confirm a suspected reprint. The typographical additions in most Dover prints include the cover pages, the table of contents, titles and page numbers. Reprints of the 1980s are harder to recognize, as they only include a standard bold serif-type font as title, as in this example. Since the 1990s, the title is a more slender serif-type font, and next to the page numbers the title is repeated on each page, as in this example.
