A treatise on the challenges facing workers — and potential solutions — that advocates socialism at the turn of the 20th century.
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...
A chemistry treatise that weds the hard sciences with theosophical insight, making a microscope of the psychic mind.
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.
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...
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 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
A Passion series in which ornamental motifs invade the Christ’s narrative.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public.
Prints made using a technique known as blackwork which flourished from the 1580s to the 1620s.
In the public domain at last, *Steamboat Willie* debuted both Mickey Mouse and cartoon synchronised sound to a widespread audience.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
Containing 405 alphabet specimens from 164 languages, the book is a treasure chest for the epigraphical imagination.
Details of a whole raft of important changes aimed at improving how we communicate rights labelling and championing those institutions openly sharing public domain works.
https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2023/10/sources-and-rights-labelling-overhaul
Käthe Kollwitz's etchings based on the German Peasants’ War and a mysterious woman called Black Anna.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/kollwitz-peasants-war
Illustrations that employ a magic-lantern conceit: the shadow thrown by a spotlit individual can reveal her inner character.
Does a healthy intellectual culture resemble a battlefield or a kitchen? Revisiting Milton’s Areopagitica, a tract often championed by today’s free speech absolutists, Katie Kadue finds a deb...
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/free-speech-and-bad-meats
This Victorian dictionary collects the cant of thieves, the slang of costermongers, and many other argots.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dictionary-of-modern-slang
The greatest astronomical work of its age, this Arabic book represents each constellation twice: once from below and once from above.
Curious two-volume illustrated book on bonsai which dispensed not only with the vessels but with the trees themselves.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/selection-of-whisk-ferns
The introduction of gin to England was a delirious and deleterious affair, as tipplers reported a range of effects: loss of reason, frenzy, madness, joy, and death. With the help of prints by Geo...
A work of millennial scope by a self-taught African-American historian.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/history-of-the-negro-race-in-america
Manesson’s book encompasses theories of fortifications from their origins in designs developed in the sixteenth century by Michelangelo.
A leatherbound volume of some hundred photocollages, featuring elaborate, fantastical watercolour settings for photographic portraits of friends, family, and pets.
Influencing numerous later animal tales told around the world, the 8th-century Arabic fables of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s *Kalīlah wa-Dimnah* also inspired a rich visual tradition of illustration: ja...
On a voyage from England to Bombay, C. V. Raman penned a short paper that forever changed how we see the sea.
This book by Hokusai assembles images of famous Japanese and Chinese warriors, both historical and legendary.
A survey of the Smithsonian by the first curator of photography in the United States.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/smillie-smithsonian
Outselling books by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells in their day, Marie Corelli’s occult romance novels brim with fantasies of telepathy, mesmerism, and radioactivity. Steven Connor revisits...
Written by an exterminator, this treatise wanders into a surprising mode: one inflected not by disgust, but rather coy wonder and begrudging awe.
Thirty albumen silver prints of designs created through ornamental lathework.
These caricatures of well-known Philadelphians transpose human heads onto animal forms.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/comic-natural-history
For almost 250 years, a mysterious pleasure park sat on the banks of Amsterdam's canals. Angela Vanhaelen leads us on a tour of the bawdy fountains, disorienting maze, and mechanical androids in ...
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/wonder-and-pleasure-in-the-oude-doolhof-of-amsterdam
In this Hebrew medical diagram, the human body is mapped onto a house: the stomach becomes a kitchen; the lungs, latticed windows.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/body-as-house-diagram
Was an alien woman really cast back into the sea after surfacing on the coast of Japan in 1803?
Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Machines.
https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2023/06/launch-of-mid-year-fundraiser-june-23
Time travel with a hairpin twist: two women land in the psyche of Marie Antoinette in 1792, while she is thinking about 1789.
A mysterious staple of Buenos Aires nightlife in the 1910s and 20s, Raúl Grigera was an audacious Afro-Argentine dandy, an eccentric bohemian icon, a man who called himself el murciélago (the...
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/raul-grigera-black-dandy-of-buenos-aires
This silent picture offers a glimpse into the early activities of the Denishawn dance school.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/denishawn-dance-film
To ward off attackers this mythical animal was said to expel excrement with a devastating explosive force.
The heart of this book is the sharp and disjointed accounts of survivors, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/san-francisco-calamity
Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who disc...
Painted by an unidentified artist, these opera characters are gathered from literature, military history, and myth.
These images of the LA Alligator Farm depict a level of casual proximity unthinkable today.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/los-angeles-alligator-farm
An early guide to communicating in the language now known as Plains Indian Sign Language.
Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological haunt...
Taking a child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: admiring exclamation marks and militaristic semicolons.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/punctuation-personified
In these images, Vérany realizes his ambition — to accurately render “the suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the transparency and the coloring” of cephalopods.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/verany-cephalopods
A collection of more than 60 sundial inscriptions, exploring various themes relating to the passing of time.
From cabbage green to course meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how phy...
In this “personal guidance” film, Phil the shy guy learns a valuable lesson: to fit in, you need to “think about the other guy”.
In these illustrations, Emerson's words are interpreted literally, repurposed for cheeky, teasing, and toothless ends.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/cranch-new-philosophy
A sprawling eighty-page poem about teeth, written by an eminent dentist, with fifty pages of erudite endnotes.
These watercolour images depict a lost 19th-century Manhattan of grand country estates and vast private gardens.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/manhattans-last-arcadia