The Public Domain Review

Arthur Wesley Dow's influential arts education handbook fused Japanese ukiyo-e with the author's unique minimalism, which he derived from the landscapes of New England.

This turn-of-the-century guide to pigeon breeds marries the concerns of fanciers with the evolutionary theories of naturalists.

From the vast confines of his imaginary prisons to the billowy scenes that comprise his grotteschi, the early works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi wed the exacting details of first-hand observation with the farthest reaches of artistic imagination. Susan Stewart journeys through this 18th-century engraver-architect’s paper worlds.

Against the backdrop of the American Revolution, Judith Sargent Murray’s essay made what was, at the time, a radical claim: women are the intellectual equals of men.

The oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot sequence, this mysterious deck contains a multitude of puzzles for both scholars and cartomancers.

Brad Fox tells a history-story that pulls on a life-thread in the tangle of things. But that only makes it all a little knottier, no?

For William James, “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity.

Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center.

An oracular hoax by William Henry Ireland, aka Herman Kirchenhoffer, that profited from the 19th-century mania for Egyptology and Napoleonic relics.

This "Bible" selectively illustrates the Old and New Testaments, taking us from Genesis to Revelation in a series of 231 beautifully executed miniatures.