The Public Domain Review

follow: @[email protected]

Posts

Autobiography of a “Jeep” (1943)

Cybernetic Attention: All Watched over by Machines We Learned to Watch

Flights of Fancy: The Nine Birds of Jacques de Fornazeris (1594)

A Prophet of the Weather: Lantern Slides by Clement Lindley Wragge (ca. 1900–22)

Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899)

Happy Public Domain Day 2026!

Top 10 Most Read Pieces from 2025

A Thousand and One Nights in Italy: The Moorish Fantasias of Cesare Mattei and Ferdinando Panciatichi

Nature Morte: Chaïm Soutine’s Still Lifes (ca. 1920s)

Deceit and Disrobing: The Schefer Maqāmāt (BNF Arabe 5847, ca. 1237)

Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1865)

The Launch of Our End-of-Year Fundraiser!

“Quaint Dessert Dishes” in American Homes and Gardens (1911)

Henri Rivière’s Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1888–1902)

Art in Art: Cabinets of Curiosity and the Rise of the Gallery Painting

Too Computerised? Too Cold?: 1999 A.D. (1967)

New T-Shirts (Now in 100% Organic Cotton) and New Mugs in Our Shop!

Roma Lister, Aradia, and the Speculative Origins of a Witchcraft Revival

Last Order Dates for the Holiday Season - 2025

Perverse, Grotesque, Sensuous, Inimitable: A Selection of Works by Aubrey Beardsley

Animal Costumes from the 1862 Fairytale Ball of the Jung-München Artist’s Association

PDR's Halloween Reader

“That’s Why We Become Witches”: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)

Hooked on Sonics: Experimenting with Sound in 19th-Century Popular Science

A Treatise on the All-Healing Qualities of Earth Bathing (1790)

Paramaribo and the Plantation: Gerrit Schouten’s Dioramas of Suriname (1810–30)

The Nature of the Beast: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806)

The Adventures and Experiences of the First Slovak Novel

Vertiginous Accounts: Travels in the Air (1871 edition)

Birth of the Pearl (1901)

The End of the World as We (Didn’t) Know It: Now and Then #5

The Shadow of Desire: Painting the Origins of Art (ca. 1625–1850)

“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess

A Collection of Old English Customs, and Curious Bequests and Charities (1842)

Ivan Aivazovsky’s Miniature Seascapes (ca. 1887)

The Cat’s Maew: Thai Treatise on Auspicious Felines (19th Century)

Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern Camera Obscura

Cannibal Modernity: Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928)

Flowers of Fealty: Wilhelm Dilich’s Commemoration of the Christening of Elisabeth of Hesse (1598)

Breaking the Celestial Ceiling: Now and Then #4

Through the Magnifying Glass: The Cheese Mites (1903)

Splitting Hairs: Chinese Immigrants, the Queue, and the Boundaries of Political Citizenship

The Mowing-Devil (1678), or, the Earliest Known Depiction of a Crop Circle

Perspiration, Bilocation, and Plagiarisation: “The Heat Wave” (1929)

The “Private” Photographs of Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg (ca. 1895–1903)

Dancing Naked on the Head of a Pin: The Early History of Microphotography

Trojan Pig: Tiny Cryptic #11

The Language of Form: Lothar Schreyer’s Kreuzigung (1920)

Strings Attached: Helen Haiman Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes (1920)

Off with Their Heads: Illustrations of Blemmyes (ca. 1175–1724)

Imagining an Idle Countess: George Wightwick’s The Palace of Architecture

Under Construction: Tiny Cryptic #10

Drawing on Tradition: Elena Izcue’s Peruvian Art in the School (1926)

Charles Davy’s Conjectural Observations on the Origin and Progress of Alphabetic Writing (1772)

Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (ca. 1920 edition)

The Old, Old, Very Old Man: Thomas Parr and the Longevity Trade

Old Tricks: Tiny Cryptic #9

“The Great Enigma of Our Times”: Henry George’s Poverty and Progress (1881 edition)

In the Penal Colony: Now and Then #3

Gilded Fish: Illustrations from Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780)

Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie, or the History of Bees (1634 edition)

As Bright as a Feather: Ostriches, Home Dyeing, and the Global Plume Trade

Warburg’s Werewolf: An Anamnesis

Mudpots and Fumaroles: Lithographs of Yellowstone’s Thermal Springs (1883)

Feather Tickler: Tiny Cryptic #8

A Popeless Situation: Now and Then #2

Tangled Dürer: The Six Knots (ca. before 1521)

Nikolai Agnivtsev’s Little Screw (1925)

Confessional Boxes: Tiny Cryptic #7

“I Am Making the World My Confessor”: Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte

Oskar Kokoschka, Hermine Moos, and the Alma Mahler Doll

Photographs of the Samaritan Passover on Mount Gerizim (1917)

Sea Monsters Unmasked and Sea Fables Explained by Henry Lee (1883)

Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism

Zig-a-zig-ah: Tiny Cryptic #6

Sheet Mewsic: Moritz von Schwind’s Katzensymphonie (1868)

“The Form of a Demon and the Heart of a Person”: Kitagawa Utamaro’s Prints of Yamauba and Kintarō (ca. 1800)

Uncommon Sense: Edward B. Foote’s Plain Home Talk (1896 edition)

Jack London, Jack Johnson, and the Fight of the Century

Boxing Clever: Tiny Cryptic #5

Bedded Bugs and Stung Beetles: The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912)

Through a Glass Lushly: Michalina Janoszanka’s Reverse Paintings (ca. 1920s)

The Mermaid “at Home!” (1809)

A Princely Ploy: Inside the Ruse of a French-Armenian Scammer

Ostrich Egg-Shell Cups of Mesopotamia and the Ostrich in Ancient and Modern Times (1926)

Con Heir: Tiny Cryptic #4

Master of Claude de France’s Book of Flower Studies (ca. 1510–1515)

José Guadalupe Posada’s Engravings of Unusual Births (ca. 1880–1910)

For He’s a Jolly Bad Fellow: Now and Then #1

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Fashion, Politics, and Identity in Mughal South Asia

The Drift of Things: David Goodman Croly’s Glimpses of the Future (1888)

Sartorial Codes: Tiny Cryptic #3

Gustatory Wisdom: Bruegel the Elder’s Twelve Proverbs (1558)

What Is It Like to Be a Bass? Fish-Eye View Photography (1919–22)

The Cat’s Meat Man: Feeding Felines in Victorian London

Paws for Thought: Tiny Cryptic #2

Reality Iced: Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922)

Pied Beauty: Wari Tie-Dye Textiles (ca. 425–1100)

George Baxter’s Print of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (ca. 1854)

“Relaxations for the Impotent”: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare and the Contradictions of American Smut

Fantazius’ Folly: Tiny Cryptic #1

Peckish Alphabetics: The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye (ca. 1793–1796)

A Wetted Beak: Engravings from Pauline Knip’s Les Pigeons (1811)

Piled High: 17th-Century Dutch Banquet Scenes

Designing the Sublime: Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution

Happy Together: The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1921)

Alfred G. Mayer’s On the Color and Color-Patterns of Moths and Butterflies (1897)

Perpetual Movement: Francis Picabia’s 391 Review (1917–1924)

Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive

Happy Public Domain Day 2025!