The Public Domain Review

The Blossoms of Morality intended for the amusement and instruction of young ladies and gentlemen by the editor of The looking-glass for the mind ; with forty-seven cuts ; designed and engraved by I. Bewick.; 4th edition, 1806; Printed for J. Harris in London. As the subtitle proclaims, this book originally published in the late 18th century is “intended for the amusement and instruction of young ladies and gentlemen”. The introduction is presumably one into the moral ridden world of adults. A vast array of different little stories are told for the purpose, including the excellently titled “Juvenile tyranny conquered” and “The melancholy effects of pride”. Each is told in a brilliantly earnest yet flowery style, for example, the first sentence of the first story, “Ernestus and Fragilus”, reads: The faint glimmerings of the pale-faced moon on the troubled billows of the ocean are not so fleeting and inconstant as the fortune and condition of human life. 47 beautiful illustrations by I. Bewick adorn it throughout. Housed at: Internet Archive | From: California Digital Library Underlying Work: PD Worldwide | Digital Copy: No Additional Rights Download: PDF | Kindle | EPUB | Torrent HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public [...]

In the spring of 1920, at the beginning of a growing fascination with spiritualism b…

This volume is a rare edition in Dutch of the greatest of the anatomical ‘flap’ books. The work features three full-page plates with dozens of detailed anatomical illustrations superimposed so that lifting the layers shows the anatomy as it would appear during dissection. Although flaps had been used in printing before, Remmelin was the first to use them on this scale. Eight prints of the plates were produced then cut apart and pasted together to form the layers. The first authorized edition was printed in Latin in 1619 with the title Catoptrum Microcosmicum. The plates were printed in 1613, and the text without the plates was printed the following year, both without the consent of the author. Although Remmelin’s work was very popular and went through a number of editions, the format of the flaps was very delicate and not practical for the dissection room. Copies such as this one with all of the flaps intact are very rare. (Text from the NLM website) U.S. National Library of Medicine Underlying Work: PD Worldwide | Digital Copy: No Additional Rights Download: Right click on image or see source for higher res versions HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain Review [...]

And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist. And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath’s sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and [...]

The Pleasures of Melancholy, a poem, Robert Wharton; 1747; Dodsley, London. A pamphlet consisting of a poem by the English poet Thomas Warton, who from 1785 to 1790 was the Poet Laureate of England. Published in 1747, the year he graduated from Oxford, “Pleasures of Melancholy” remains one of Wharton’s best known works, and a preeminent example of the “Graveyard Poets”, a group of pre-Romantic English poets of the 18th century characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms. Housed at: Internet Archive | From: California Digital Library Underlying Work: PD Worldwide | Digital Copy: No Additional Rights Download: PDF | Kindle | EPUB | Torrent HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project and we rely on support from our readers to stay afloat. If you like what we do then please do consider making a donation. We welcome all contributions, big or small - everything helps! Become a Patron Small angel : £3.00 GBP - monthly Medium sized hero : £5.00 GBP - monthly Large emperor : £10.00 GBP - monthly Vast deity : £20.00 GBP - monthly Make a one off Donation SIGN UP TO THE NEWSLETTER [...]

The Baby’s own Aesop: being the fables condensed in rhyme with portable morals pictorially pointed by Walter Crane; 1908; F. Warne, New York. Walter Crane’s beautifully illustrated version of Aesop’s fables, shortened and put into limericks for the younger reader and first published in 1887. Aesop’s Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop: … like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. (Wikipedia) The book is housed at the Internet Archive, contributed by the New [...]

Christine Jones explores the early English translations of Charles PerraultR…

Film using stop animation shows the character “Tommy Telephone” (the AT&T advertising “spokescreature” at the time) making a telephone by assembling 433 separate parts. Housed at: Internet Archive | From: Prelinger Archives Underlying Work: PD U.S. | Digital Copy: No Additional Rights Download: Ogg | MPEG4 | Torrent HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project and we rely on support from our readers to stay afloat. If you like what we do then please do consider making a donation. We welcome all contributions, big or small - everything helps! Become a Patron Small angel : £3.00 GBP - monthly Medium sized hero : £5.00 GBP - monthly Large emperor : £10.00 GBP - monthly Vast deity : £20.00 GBP - monthly Make a one off Donation SIGN UP TO THE NEWSLETTER Sign up to get our free fortnightly newsletter which shall deliver direct to your inbox the latest brand new article and a digest of the most recent collection items. Simply add your details to the form below and click the link you receive via email to confirm your subscription! Name: E-mail:

Journal of the conversations of Lord Byron noted during a residence with his lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822 by Thomas Medwin; 1824; Henry Colburn, London. On 17th May 1824, a month after Lord Byron died, his memoirs were burnt in the upstairs drawing room of a house on Albemarle Street, London. The manuscript pages of the memoirs had been entrusted by Byron to his literary executor Thomas Moore two years earlier with a mind that one day they would be published. But with Byron dead, Byron’s publisher John Murray, thinking the pages’ supposedly scandalous contents far too damaging to both the reputation and legacy of Byron himself and presumably also to the publisher who would publish them, ripped them up and placed them in the fire. In his book Journal of the conversations of Lord Byron noted during a residence with his lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822 by Thomas Medwin, published that same year, the author endeavours to “lessen, if not remedy, the evil” of the burning of Byron’s memoirs. Housed at: Internet Archive | From: California Digital Library Underlying Work: PD Worldwide | Digital Copy: No Additional Rights Download: PDF | [...]

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner, one of the most influential and controversial composers ever to have lived. With his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) – by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts – he revolutionised opera and gave birth to such masterpieces as Tristan und Isolde and the epic four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. If his music was sublime, his political views regarding “race” were far from it – in his writings he frequently expressed anti-semitic views (particularly in his racist tract Judaism in Music). The beauty of his music and the vileness of some of his political opinions (complicated by the fact that he was reported to have had life-long Jewish friends), make him a continuing source of intrigue and debate for scholars the world over. To mark the anniversary the British Library have made available online its collection of Wagner manuscripts, mostly from early on in his career. The manuscripts come from the huge music-related manuscript collection of the great Austrian writer and music obsessive Stefan Zweig (whose writings, incidentally, passed into the public domain this year). Zweig acquired the Wagner manuscripts [...]