The Public Domain Review

This silent picture offers a glimpse into the early activities of the Denishawn dance school.

To ward off attackers this mythical animal was said to expel excrement with a devastating explosive force.

The heart of this book is the sharp and disjointed accounts of survivors, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise.

Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world.

Painted by an unidentified artist, these opera characters are gathered from literature, military history, and myth.

These images of the LA Alligator Farm depict a level of casual proximity unthinkable today.

An early guide to communicating in the language now known as Plains Indian Sign Language.

Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences.

Taking a child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: admiring exclamation marks and militaristic semicolons.

In these images, Vérany realizes his ambition — to accurately render “the suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the transparency and the coloring” of cephalopods.