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 [...]

Selected illustrations from the German architect and engineer Georg Andreas Böckler’s Architectura Curiosa Nova (1664). The book is mostly concerned with the theory of hydrodyanmics, water pump systems and different designs for water fountains, but also contains this series of elaborate geometrical pleasure garden designs. It’s not entirely clear whether they are projected plans or a record of what already existed (if anyone knows then please do let us know!). Housed at: Wikimedia Commons | From: Deutsche Fotothek 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 [...]

More than 170 years before Jean-François Champollion had the first real success i…

Selected plates from How I killed the tiger; being an account of my encounter with a royal Bengal tiger, with an appendix containing some general information about India (1902), a small book by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Sheffield detailing his close brush with death by tiger. As the author explains in his introduction: My main purpose in writing this little book, was to place in a permanent form a description of my wonderful preservation from death in a chance encounter with a Royal Bengal Tiger. My life had been adventurous up to that time. I had shot big game of various kinds. But this episode, so marvellous in itself, so important in its influence upon my after life and character, marks the close of my career as a hunter of big game. Read the book, including more illustrative plates, over in our post in the Texts collection. Housed at: Internet Archive | From: University of Toronto Libraries 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 [...]