The Public Domain Review

An animated GIF excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from a 19th century Edison film. “An osculatory performance by May Irwin and John Rice”, a scene from the New York stage comedy, The Widow Jones, in which Irwin and Rice starred. According to Edison film historian C. Musser, the actors staged their kiss for the camera at the request of the New York world newspaper, and the resulting film was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896. The first ever kiss to be caught on film. You can see the full film featured on The Public Domain Review here and also on the Internet Archive. See more creations from Okkult Motion Pictures here in our Animated GIFs Collection. Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website: / Facebook / Twitter All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license. HELP TO KEEP US AFLOAT The Public Domain […]

A series of animated GIFs excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from a short Universal Newsreel from 1950, in which the knife thrower Louella Gallagher performs with her two daughters: Connie Ann of 5 years and Colleena Sue 2 and 1/2. You can see the full film featured on The Public Domain Review here and also on the Internet Archive as part of the Prelinger Archives collection. See more creations from Okkult Motion Pictures here in our Animated GIFs Collection. Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website: / Facebook / Twitter All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license. 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! […]

CURATOR’S CHOICE #1: PHIL HATFIELD AND ANDREW GRAY FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY Phil Hatfield, British Library Curator in Canadian and Caribbean Studies, and Andrew Gray, British Library Wikipedian in Residence, kick off our brand new Curator’s Choice series by taking a look at the fascinating array of photographs in the British Library’s Canadian Colonial Copyright Collection. Copyright collections – those aggregations of published material accumulated by libraries as a result of copyright deposit laws – can provide a unique view of the world; especially when they have the opportunity to add photographs to their holdings. With minimal curatorial involvement in their selection and collection, as well as few gate keepers beyond the administration fee required to register copyright, you could say that such caches of material are a rare thing – a photographic world selected by myriad photographers themselves. This is the format of the British Library’s Colonial Copyright Collection of Canadian photographs, over 4,000 images registered for deposit and collected by the Library between 1895 and 1924. By and large the contents of the collection have been copyrighted as a result of the quality of the shot, the potential to make money from the photograph or, most likely, a […]

With his Vera Historia, the 2nd century satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote the first…

Traditional music for the midsummer “Schottische” dance, known as “Schottis” in Scandinavia where this score is thought to have originated from. The dance is considered by The Oxford Companion to Music to be a kind of slower polka, with continental-European origin (possibly Bohemia). The recording might possibly be of accordion duo Arvid Franzen and Einar Holt recorded in the mid 1920s in New York. Housed at: Internet Archive Underlying Work: PD 70 Years | Digital Copy: Pending Clarification Download: Flac | VBR MP3 | Ogg Vorbis 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 […]

Perversion for Profit is a 1965 propaganda film financed by Charles Keating and narrated by news reporter George Putnam. A vehement diatribe against pornography, the film argues that sexually explicit materials corrupt young viewers and readers, leading to acts of violence and “perverted” attitudes regarding sex – including inclination toward homosexuality. Pornography is also painted as part of the Communist conspiracy and the motor behind the decline of Western civilization: This same type of rot and decay caused sixteen of the nineteen major civilizations to vanish from the Earth. Magnificent Egypt, classical Greece, imperial Rome, all crumbled away not because of the strength of the aggressor, but because of moral decay from within. But we are in a unique position to cure our own ills: our Constitution was written by men who put their trust in God and founded a government based in His laws. These laws are on our side. We have a constitutional guarantee of protection against obscenity. And, in this day especially, we must seek to deliver ourselves from this twisting, torturing evil. We must save our nation from decay and deliver our children from the horrors of perversion. We must make our land, ‘the land of […]

X-Ray images of women wearing corsets from the second volume of the French doctor Ludovic O’Followell’s Le Corset (1908). Although Dr O’Followell was clearly keen to show the damaging impact of corsets on women’s health, he did not actually want the corset to be abolished, but was simply trying to encourage a less severe design. Dr O’Followell in fact continued to write a regular column for the deluxe corsetier’s magazine Les Dessous Elégance. Wikimedia Commons Found via: Retronaut 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 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 […]

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 [...]