"samsloan" writes:
Suppose that the great-grandson of the guy who wrote the book in 1932
shows up and claims the rights to the book I have reprinted.

Is it correct to say that at the worst all I owe him is a royalty, say
10%, on the books I have sold and, since I have not sold any of these
books yet, I owe him nothing.

IANAL but I gather that in a blatant enough situation he could nail
you for willful infringement and collect statutory damages of big
bucks.

Regarding the 1937 book, that was by a Soviet author, and since the
Soviet Union did not recognize our copyrights, under no circumstances
would I ever own him anything, even if he were alive today. (He died in
1942).

IANAL but I think you are fairly safe on this one. There are some
enterprising lawyers trying to claim some of those old Soviet works
are really still copyrighted over here, but there's been so much
reprinting that if anything happens it will probably be rather slowly
and at worst you'll get some letter telling you to cut it out or else.
At that point you'd likely only have problems if you persisted.

The informational circulars at the loc.gov copyright office may be of
some help to you on all this stuff.