The Public Domain Review

“As a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded” — this is the kind of life envisioned by Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)....

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/margaret-fuller-and-the-first-major-work-of-american-feminism

Landmark study collecting global tales relating to lycanthropes and other human-animal transformations.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-book-of-were-wolves

A shamanistic tool as described by one of the earliest studies of the indigenous peoples of Fennoscandia.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/etching-of-a-sami-drum

A mysterious early modern engraving imagining the world imposed on a jester’s face.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fools-cap-map-of-the-world

“Make films about the people, they said”, Jean-Luc Godard once quipped, “but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?” Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a y...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-man-and-the-crowd

A collage and poetry collaboration by two members of a storied *ménage à trois*.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/eluard-ernst-les-malheurs-des-immortels

A seemingly modern moment of abstraction in a medieval manuscript, representing silence as a yellow rectangle.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/yellow-silence-miniature-from-the-silos-apocalypse

A Christian socialist speech by the first woman to run for president and the first person to publish the Communist Manifesto in the US.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/victoria-woodhull-the-impending-revolution

A man who “believed in nothing, not even himself”, Henri Rochefort is now a minor footnote in the annals of modern journalism. However, at the height of his notoriety, in the late 1860s and e...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/henri-rochefort-and-the-origins-of-french-populism

Perhaps greatest hoax in American natural history.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/cardiff-giant

Engravings based on watercolour images made at one of the first British colonies in North America.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/briefe-and-true-report-de-bry-engravings

An early treatise on chromotherapy — the supposed science of healing physical and psychic ailments with colour.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/principles-of-light-and-color

Labelled a “cretin” and “imbecile” in his lifetime, the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind had profound talents when it came to drafting the feline form. Kirsten Tambling reconstructs the biogra...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/gottfried-mind-the-raphael-of-cats

The very first drawing of the microscopic "water bear" by a theologian turned microscope explorer.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/tardigrade

A Renaissance guide to dieting that Nietzsche thought was the second most harmful book.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/cornaro-sure-and-certain-methods

A nine volume series that faithfully reproduced virtually all pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican books in European collections at the time.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/antiquities-of-mexico

When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with b...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/scenes-of-reading-on-the-early-portrait-postcard

Photographs of wild flowers taken by photographers from a Christian utopian community that settled in East Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/wild-flowers-of-palestine

A 650-page philological foray into ancient sexuality, surprisingly light on STDs.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-plague-of-lust

A “part-talkie” that offers a simple solution to modern urban isolation: love.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/paul-fejos-lonesome

The sight of a skeletal corpse rarely inspires a rollicking jig. Yet for more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/our-mortal-waltz-the-dance-of-death-across-centuries

The only fully illustrated herbal from the incunabula period of German history.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hartlieb-book-of-herbs

Macrophotographs of a myriad array of creepy crawlies, captured with the help of a 20-foot long camera.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/book-of-monsters

A 17th-century treatise on women’s right to education, written by an exceptional polyglot.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-learned-maid

The story of early cinema may have been different had Wordsworth Donisthorpe been better at blackmail. Irfan Shah goes digging in the archives to recover the details of this forgotten polymath �...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/wordsworth-donisthorpe-blackmail-and-the-first-motion-pictures

An intriguing photograph taken during Thomas Eakins’ studies of animal locomotion.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/eakins-horse-leg

A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/diagramming-sentences-in-the-19th-century

Ethereal illustrations for a book that charts the voices of Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, and other illustrious writers and thinkers from beyond the grave.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/nos-invisibles

Created for US insurance firms during a period of devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail — shops, homes, churches, brothels, and opium dens wer...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/sanborn-fire-insurance-maps

Spanning half a millennium, these images feature a perspective that art historians call the *Rückenfigur* — a focus on the human back.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/ruckenfigur

An illuminated prayer book woven on mechanical looms programmed by punch card.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/lyon-woven-prayer-book

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

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2024/06/launch-of-mid-year-fundraiser-june-24

Small paintings of eyes that were gifted between lovers in England.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/eye-miniatures

Rococo designs that picture China as a utopian world of pleasure and caprice.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/chinese-arabesques

Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human spe...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/early-androids-and-artificial-speech

A diary kept by a Dutch sailor abandoned on Ascension Island as punishment for having a relationship with another man.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/sodomy-punished

Hollywood's first natural-color feature film and the breakout role for Anna May Wong, considered the first Chinese American movie star.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-toll-of-the-sea

While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition....

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/same-as-it-ever-was

More than 70 images of the magical, hallucinogenic, and perilous mandrake.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/mandrakes

A broadside illustration depicting the execution of an alchemist, hanged upon a gallows made from the very object of his crime.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/gilded-gallows-of-georg-honauer

A literary magazine whose criterion for acceptance was simple: each piece had to have been previously rejected.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/le-petit-journal-des-refusees

Richard Owen, the Victorian scientist who first named the “dinosaurs”, claimed that he could identify an animal, even an extinct one, from inspecting a single bone. Richard Fallon revisits ot...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/richard-owen-and-victorian-literature

A treatise on the challenges facing workers — and potential solutions — that advocates socialism at the turn of the 20th century.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/capital-and-labor

Stereographs depicting daily life in Palestine before the British Mandate.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/photographs-of-palestinian-life

Aquatint engravings that were employed to reproduce the tonal subtleties of drawings.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maria-catharina-prestel

In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and M...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/pseudo-boccaccio-yiddish-pulp-fiction-and-the-man-who-ripped-off-joyce

A chemistry treatise that weds the hard sciences with theosophical insight, making a microscope of the psychic mind.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/occult-chemistry

From the mid-sixteenth century, broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events circulated widely across the Holy Roman Empire against the backdrop of Reformation.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/celestial-phenomena-16th-century-germany

A fantasia of travellers and archipelago dwellers, illustrated in a chimerical fashion by the author.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/weird-islands

Throwing people out of windows (or _defenestrating_ them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/windows-onto-history

A guide to Italian landscape architecture by Edith Wharton, written to accompany colourful images of villas by Maxfield Parrish.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/edith-wharton-italian-villas

By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, ​​Octavian Esanu asks, playfully and tenderly, if we can see pedagogy as perf...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/mimesis-expression-construction

A Passion series in which ornamental motifs invade the Christ’s narrative.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/passio-verbigenae

A form of WWI trench art in which soldiers carved names and images into leaves.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hippolyte-hodeau-trench-art

Of all the caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, representations of the French emperor as a miniscule megalomaniac continue to haunt the historical imagination to an unparalleled degree. Peter W. Wa...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/little-boney

An uncanny collection of folk tales written and illustrated by Sigmund Freud’s niece.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/tom-seidmann-freud-hare-tales

Haunted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, these visualisations of proverbs look backward to uncertain origins.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/wierix-flemish-proverbs

Photographs of tattoos by Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s first professional tattoo artist.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/sutherland-macdonald-tattoos

What can we learn from observing the progression of spring — a hawthorn’s first flowering, the return of birdsong on a particular day? Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores the lifelong calendrical...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/from-snowdrop-to-nightjar

Set of spectacular engravings of insects and their floral abodes — one of the first natural histories of Suriname.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/merian-metamorphosis

Britain's first clay animation film imagines a malleable substance spontaneously giving rise to manifold forms.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/animated-putty

An English translation of an influential 16th-century Italian etiquette guide. Its proposition is simple but difficult to get right: politeness is the art of pleasing others.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/galateo

When Georgiana Houghton first exhibited her paintings at a London gallery in 1871, their wild eddies of colour and line were unlike anything the public had seen before — nor would see again unt...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-substantiality-of-spirit

A type of woodblock print known as *namazu-e*, these images involve a myth that earthquakes were caused by the movements of a great catfish.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/earthquakes-in-japanese-woodblock-prints

The oldest American children's book still in print, Wanda Gág's classic opens onto surprisingly political themes.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/millions-of-cats

Eleven lithographs of Java from drawings by an eccentric Dutch colonial explorer who believed elevation equals greatness.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/junghuhn-java-album

According to his memoirs, Eugène-François Vidocq escaped from more than twenty prisons (sometimes dressed as a nun). Working on the other side of the law, he apprehended some 4000 criminals wit...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/eugene-francois-vidocq-and-the-birth-of-the-detective

A genre-defying work by the creator of Peter Pan about the pleasures of smoking.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/my-lady-nicotine

Beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/gotham-attucks

Prints made using a technique known as blackwork which flourished from the 1580s to the 1620s.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/blackwork

In the public domain at last, *Steamboat Willie* debuted both Mickey Mouse and cartoon synchronised sound to a widespread audience.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/steamboat-willie

Soon after Clementina Hawarden began taking photographs in the mid-19th century, her eye caught on doubles, reflections, her daughters glimpsed in the mirror. Stassa Edwards examines the role tha...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/through-the-cheval-glass

A compilation of silhouette portraits by the artist Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904), which includes short biographies, picture riddles, and poems.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/kumanaki-kage

A science fiction novel about optography — the scientific belief that images could be recovered from the eyes and brains of the dead.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dr-berkeleys-discovery

More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills ...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-early-history-of-the-channel-tunnel

A self-styled glaciologist, Rabot undertook four expeditions to the Arctic in his lifetime, taking stunning photographs that capture an abiding sense of stillness.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/rabot-photographs-of-the-arctic

This strange volume puts the lie to Ditchfield’s title: tyrants, not books, kill authors.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/books-fatal-to-their-authors

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, when a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to share and reuse for any purpose. Here's our highlights for 2024.

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2024/01/public-domain-day-2024

From gin-drinking to cities plunging over clifftops, a rundown of the ten most read pieces we published this year.

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2023/12/top-10-most-read-pieces-from-2023

The story of how a homemade, anti-capitalist game created by a woman becomes a mass-produced uber-capitalist game that profited a man.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-landlords-game

In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a ...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/anna-atkins-cyanotypes

Desprez’s 121 engravings illustrate garbs supposedly found the world over in 1562, worn by humans and monsters alike.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/recueil-de-la-diversite-des-habits

A festive collection of literary parody by the “incomparable” Max Beerbohm.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/christmas-garland

Our End-of-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be The Heavens.

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2023/11/launch-of-end-of-year-fundraiser-2023

Photographs of *nuuttipukit*: Finns who dressed as goats in order to procure beer and leftovers after Christmas.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/nuuttipukki

Edison Studios film showing the lights of Luna Park and Dreamland during the peak of the famed New York amusement district.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/coney-island-at-night

In the 1850s, as photography took its first steps toward commercial reproducibility, a more intimate use for light-sensitive plates briefly bloomed. It had a few names: heliographic drawing, phot...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/cliche-verre-and-friendship-in-19th-century-france

Handmade book showing Paul Claudel's scenario, with illustrations by Audrey Parr and Hélène Hoppenot, for Darius Milhaud's ballet *L'homme et son desir*.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/man-and-his-desire

The recommended cut-off dates to order from our shop by to ensure delivery in time for Dec 25th.

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2023/11/last-order-dates-for-christmas-2023

19th-century German chromolithographs of paper lanterns, the kind used to celebrate St. Martin's Day.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/paper-lantern-catalogue

Levitation was the last thing Teresa of Avila wanted. It drew the wrong kind of attention and embarrassed her in public. She tried to remain grounded, clinging to furniture when the weightlessnes...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-reluctant-levitator

An examination of the three books that Frankenstein's monster reads to educate himself about human life.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/frankenstein-monster-reading-list

A big batch of new prints is added to our online shop — and also free shipping, and discounts on multiple orders.

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2023/11/54-new-prints-and-now-free-shipping!

A map and pamphlet that proposes dividing Central Europe into 24 sector-shaped cantons, among other eccentric reforms aimed at peace.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/unionization-of-central-europe

Skeletal illustrations supposedly replicating a lost manuscript by a wine and women–loving Zen monk.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/ikkyu-in-hell

Characterised today by the noise of banging, buzzers, and the cries of inmates, solitary confinement was originally developed from Quaker ideas about the redemptive power of silence, envisioned a...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/silent-treatment

The first book-length history of Halloween, written when the author was a mere twenty-six years old.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-book-of-halloween

Photographs of fire tests carried out at the turn of the century to keep women’s clothing from catching on fire.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fire-tests-with-textiles

A collection of prints by eight artists envisioning a new Tokyo.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/aftershock-of-the-new

Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts...

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/agrippa-occult-philosophy