The Public Domain Review
https://publicdomainreview.org/blogAn online journal exploring curious and obscure works that have entered the public domain, featuring essays, collections, and cultural commentary on historical art, literature, and media.
Entries
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A book more or less responsible for the revival of Flat Earth theories in the modern period.
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Indian images that grapple with the unbearable fact that lover and beloved are not one.
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In the late nineteenth century, visitors to Maine observed something strange: French-Canadian lumberjacks who, at the...
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Postcards that summon medieval grotesques and brightly coloured folk art, but also feel distinctly modern.
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A history of the Evil One, from the earliest times to the present.
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Carl Jung’s copy of an alchemical hoax, purporting to detail the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone.
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Erasmus called them “little moons” and George Puttenham praised them as “figures of tolerable disorder” (if used not ...
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Choice excerpts from *Leaves of Grass* that speak to Whitman’s conception of immortality.
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Early surgical diagrams that present patients prying themselves open for our anatomical gaze.
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An illuminated Persian manuscript about customs, culture, and caste, written by an enigmatic figure of the early Brit...
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“Oh, if I could only pray”, Luther once said of his dog Tölpel, “the way this dog watches the meat”. Attending to att...
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“A Cat-astrophe” came on the tail end of an odd 1918 boom in cat-themed music.
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By manipulating paper flaps, the child could turn Adam into Eve into a mermaid, a lion into a griffin into an eagle —...
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Vibrant textiles from the dazzling Timurid metropolis of Bukhara.
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Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in *The Matrix*, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of diffi...
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Photographs from when Atlantic City beaches featured artists ornately sculpting sand.
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A Zoroastrian text about serpents translated by the President of the Bombay Anthropological Society.
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Circular maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness.
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Pompous know-it-alls were once a mainstay of mockery on the Italian stage. Arnoud Visser investigates this stock char...
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Cover designs for José Carlos Mariátegui’s radical Lima-based magazine.