The Public Domain Review

A book more or less responsible for the revival of Flat Earth theories in the modern period.

Indian images that grapple with the unbearable fact that lover and beloved are not one.

In the late nineteenth century, visitors to Maine observed something strange: French-Canadian lumberjacks who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out with their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak.

Postcards that summon medieval grotesques and brightly coloured folk art, but also feel distinctly modern.

A history of the Evil One, from the earliest times to the present.

Carl Jung’s copy of the “mute book”, an alchemical manual charting (through a series of images) the “humid way” of forging the Philosopher’s Stone.

Erasmus called them “little moons” and George Puttenham praised them as “figures of tolerable disorder” (if used not too often “nor too thick”).

Choice excerpts from Leaves of Grass that speak to Whitman’s conception of immortality.

Early surgical diagrams that present patients prying themselves open for our anatomical gaze.

An illuminated Persian manuscript about customs, culture, and caste, written by an enigmatic figure of the early British Raj.

“Oh, if I could only pray”, Luther once said of his dog Tölpel, “the way this dog watches the meat”.

“A Cat-astrophe” came on the tail end of an odd 1918 boom in cat-themed music.

By manipulating paper flaps, the child could turn Adam into Eve into a mermaid, a lion into a griffin into an eagle — all while learning about the inevitability of death.

Vibrant textiles from the dazzling Timurid metropolis of Bukhara.

Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning.

Photographs from when Atlantic City beaches featured artists ornately sculpting sand.

A Zoroastrian text about serpents translated by the President of the Bombay Anthropological Society.

Circular maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness.

Pompous know-it-alls were once a mainstay of mockery on the Italian stage.

Cover designs for José Carlos Mariátegui’s radical Lima-based magazine.

Selections from the long-running British journal on historical peculiarities, from the whereabouts of Mary Queen of Scot’s severed head to the identity of Charles I's hooded executioner.

Diagrams from a now-lost Urdu manuscript illustrating the propitious days and directions for travel.

Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting.

69 images of kite flying from across 5 centuries and some dozen countries.

Artworks from an era when Venetians brawled on bridges.

A philosophical system and a practical guide for the cultivation of dramatic genius.

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Soil.

Legal infographics that reflect a Turkish nation in flux.

In the Middle Ages, rumours spread across Europe of a strange hybrid creature, half-animal, half-plant, known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

Photographs of flowers by an advocate of California’s beauty.

Historical predictions from the Scottish Nostradamus.

Photographs and films of a forgotten pastime.

Before Linotype revolutionised typesetting in the 1880s, compositors set texts by hand — and they set them fast.

A Dutch physician’s encounter with acupuncture.

A treatise on a powder that can cure wounds at a distance.

The working class undergirds everything in this cartoon of capitalist society.

What allowed occultism to blossom in the United States at the turn of the 20th century?

Lantern slide of man battling bug.

An early contribution to drug literature, in which a man came to be fashioned out of wood.

Announcing an exciting new book series!

A modernist adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe.

The creator of WNYC's Public Song Project on creativity, copyright, and the public domain.

As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead.

Marvels, wonders, and monstrosities: something between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects.

One of the most elaborate works of literary insult ever written.

Moneymaking caricatures by a teenage Monet, before he turned to Impressionism.

In early modern Europe, around the time when lenses began to bring the world (and heavens) into newfound focus, patients started appearing in medical records with a particular ailment: a firm belief that they were made of glass.

"Tall-tale" or "exaggeration" postcards illustrating the bounties of California.

A utopian novel where men are no longer necessary.

Illustrations of Javanese wayang kulit puppets with vivid colour and gilding.