The Public Domain Review

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 biography of this elusive figure, whose savant-like qualities inspired later French Realists, early psychiatric theorists, and Romantic visions of the artist as outsider.

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

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

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

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 books. Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin explore this paradoxical sign of interiority and find a class of image that traverses the poles of absorption and theatricality.

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

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

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

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. Allison C. Meier tracks the motif’s evolution across history, discovering how — through times of disease, war, and economic inequality — printmaking offered a means to both critique social ills and reflect upon new forms of human devastation.

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