Difficulty of tracing rightsholders

Fellow members, I have been trying sporadically since 2001 to find  
anyone empowered to grant or withhold permission to put up a book  
chapter on my personal website. The book is _The Gadget Maker_, the  
author is "Maxwell Griffith"--full name Frederick Maxwell Griffith  
Jr--and I last raised the issue here in this mailing list in 2006 and  
acted on several good suggestions I received, none of which panned out.

While this is mostly a rant to relieve my feelings, I continue to be  
interested in any suggestions.

It was published in 1954 by Lippincott, reprinted in paper in 1955,  
and has never been heard from since. To say that the publishers have  
been unhelpful is putting it mildly. I wrote, emailed, and phoned  
Lippincott's permissions office, waited weeks, and simply got no  
reply at all, which strikes me as downright rude. Persistence at  
Lippincott eventually only the information that "All of our trade  
publications were sold to Harper Collins in New York.  We only  
publish medical books now." No contact names at HarperCollins, no  
contact names for the author or his agent or his heirs, it was their  
book once but they feel not the _slightest_ shred of responsibility  
toward it.

HarperCollins has a specific permissions form to fill out. I filled  
it out, point-by-point and mailed it to them. No reply.

The MIT alumni office shows him as a 1944 Aeronautics graduate, but  
the President of the Class of 1944 has no information about him.

whorepresents.com has no information on who represents him.

The Author's Guild has no information on him.

I paid twenty bucks or so to find out what Intelius, an online  
"search for people" service has on him, and the only Maxwell Griffith  
they know about has an address in Raquette Lake, New York--which I  
had already found for free from Anywho. I called a number of times  
and got no answer. Calls to various civic organizations and local  
businesses in Raquette Lake turned up some pay dirt, and eventually I  
located his children, who informed me that he'd passed away but was  
the wrong person--he had never gone to MIT or written a novel.

A kind person in this mailing list suggested I contact one Sarah  
Little who apparently does this kind of detective work. I did, and  
she was unable to find anything.

The copyright office shows a 1982 renewal in the name of Maxwell  
Griffith, so I don't have any heirs' names to look for.

Do not tell _me_ that there is no problem in tracing orphan works.

It is insane, plumb insane that the copyright office doesn't require  
rightsholders to maintain updated contact information as a condition  
of keeping the copyright in force. How much work would that be? What  
on earth is the justification for _not_ doing it?

This is a perfect example of an orphan work that has little  
commercial potential as a novel, but has wonderful stuff in it that  
would be a shame to lose. The chapter I'm interested in is a picture  
of the campus milieu at MIT in the 1940s. There are, of course,  
plenty of novels set at Harvard or Princeton, but let me tell you  
there are not many set at MIT! It is of great interest... to a very  
limited audience of MIT alums.



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