The Public Domain Review

Images from an Arabic manuscript featuring schematics for water powered systems, pulleys and gearing mechanisms. The date is unknown but is thought to be from sometime between the 16th and 19th century.

(All images from Max Planck Digital Library via Wikimedia Commons).

---

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!

Fancy dresses described or, What to wear at fancy balls, by Ardern Holt; 1887; Debenham & Freebody, Wyman & Sons, London.

A comprehensive guide to all things fancy dress, with detailed descriptions of costume ideas, from the more abstract such as “Air”, “Africa” “Dew” and “Five o Clock Tea”, to the more specific in a “Moravian Pesant” and “Henry III of France”.  

Open Library link

---

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!

John Flamsteed (1646-1719) was an English astronomer and the first Astronomer Royal. He catalogued over 3000 stars and was responsible for several of the earliest recorded sightings of the planet Uranus, which he mistook for a star and catalogued as ’34 Tauri’. In 1729, ten years after his death, a star atlas based on observations he made, the Atlas Coelestis, was published by his widow, assisted by Joseph Crosthwait and Abraham Sharp. The changes in the positions of stars (the original observations were made in the 1690s), led to an update made in the 1770s by the French engineer Nicolas Fortin, supervised by the astronomers Le Monnier and Messier from the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. The new version, called Atlas Fortin-Flamsteed, was a third of the size of the original and also had artistic retouching to some illustrations (mostly Andromeda, Virgo and Aquarius). The names of the constellations are in French (not in Latin) and included some nebulae discovered after the death of Flamsteed. The images below are from an updated version published in 1795, titled Atlas Céleste de Flamstéed, produced by Mechain and Lalande, with new constellations and many more nebulae. (Wikipedia)

(All images via the The United States Naval Observatory’s website Naval Oceanography Portal).

---

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!

What to draw and how to draw it, by E.G. Lutz; 1913; Dodd & Mead, New York.


Drawing made easy a helpful book for young artists; the way to begin and finish your sketches, clearly shown step by step, by E. G. Lutz; 1921; C. Scribner’s Sons, New York.

A cartoon drawing masterclass from Edwin G. Lutz, the man who inspired Walt Disney to animation fame. A 19 year old Walt is said to have discovered Lutz’s book Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, while he was working at the Kansas City Film Ad Company. From the book, he learned the many tricks of the trade from cycles to how to hold and repeat drawings. Little is known about Lutz. As well as writing numerous books on the art of drawing and animation, Lutz made his living creating cartoons, typically anthropomorphic, for newspapers such as the New York Herald and Philadelphia Press. His most frequent work was illustrating for the “Book of Magic”, which was the special children’s section of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, for which he drew many cartoons and invented children’s craft activities often involving optical tricks like the piece below. (Read more here)



For more on how to animate also check out John Robert McCrory’s How to draw for the movies (1918)

---

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!

Instrumental Hawaiian guitar version by the Louise and Ferera Hawaiian troupe of Alberto Pestalozza’s oft recorded classic “Ciribiribin” originally composed in 1898. Frank Ferera is considered to be the first great star of Hawaiian music. Ferera first visited the mainland United States as part of the Keoki E Awai troupe, and gained fame with the troupe by performing to an estimated 17 million people in a seven-month period at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. He married Helen Louise Greenus, daughter of Seattle businessman Albert E. Greenus, and as the Louise and Ferera Hawaiian troupe toured with her throughout the USA, in 1915 signing up to Columbia Records. “Ciribiribin” was to be one of the very last songs they recorded together. In December 12, 1919, Helen Louise mysteriously disappeared while the couple were on board the steamship SS President, from Los Angeles back to their home in Seattle. She had apparently gone on deck for a walk at 4 a.m. and never returned.

MP3 Download
Internet Archive Link

---

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!

Plates 294 to 299 of Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking collection from 1887 titled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements, a massive portfolio with 781 plates comprising of 20,000 photographs. In the preceding four years Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of Muybridge’s work at this time was done in a special sunlit outdoor studio, due to the bulky cameras and slow photographic emulsion speeds then available. One of his favoured subjects to show the human form in locomotion was the tennis player. (Wikipedia)

(All images taken from the Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons – clicking on the images below will give you options for higher resolution versions).

Detail from plate 294

Detail from plate 294

---

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!

France in the Year 2000 (XXI century) – a series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910, originally in the form of paper cards enclosed to cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards. They depicted the world of the future, in 2000. The first cards were produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists.

(All images via Wikimedia Commons).

---

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!

A 1927 Fox newsreel interview with the author and spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He speaks about his greatest literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, and his work in spiritualism.

Download from Internet Archive

Note this film is in the public domain in the US, but may not be in other jurisdictions. Please check its status in your jurisdiction before re-using.

---

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!

Navaho Legends, edited by G.E. Stechert; 1897; American Folk-Lore Society, New York

Book from the American Folk-Lore Society compiling Navaho myths and legends and including also a lengthy introduction on the history, beliefs and customs of the Navaho people.

I. THE STORY OF THE EMERGENCE.

136. At To‘bIllhaskI’di (in the middle of the first world), white arose in the east, and they regarded it as day there, they say ; blue rose in the south, and still it was day to them, and they moved around ; yellow rose in the west and showed that evening had come ; then dark arose in the north, and they lay down and slept.

137. At To‘bIllhaskI’di water flowed out (from a central source) in different directions ; one stream flowed to the east, another to the south, and another to the west. There were dwelling-places on the border of the stream that flowed to the east, on that which flowed to the south, and on that which flowed to the west also.

Open Library link

---

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!

A History of Mourning, by Richard Davey; 1890; Jay’s, London.

A history of mourning, burial customs, and funerary rites.

“Then occurred an event unique in history,” continues this naive contemporary chronicle. “The body of Inez was lifted from the grave, placed on a magnificent throne, and crowned Queen of Portugal. The clergy, the nobility, and the people did homage to her corpse, and kissed the bones of her hands. There sat the dead Queen, with her yellow hair hanging like a veil round her ghastly form. One fleshless hand held the sceptre, and the other the orb of royalty. At night, after the coronation ceremony, a procession was formed of all the clergy and nobility, the religious orders and confraternities which extended over many miles each person holding a flaring torch in his hand, and thus walked from Coimbra to Alcobaga, escorting the crowned corpse to that royal abbey for interment. The dead Queen lay in her rich robes upon a chariot drawn by black mules and lighted up by hundreds of lights.” The scene must indeed have been a weird one. The sable costumes of the bishops and priests, the incense issuing from innumerable censers, the friars in their quaint garments, and the fantastically-attired members of the various hermandades, or brotherhoods some of whom were dressed from head to foot entirely in scarlet, or blue, or black, or in white with their countenances masked and their eyes glittering through small openings in their cowls ; but above all, the spectre-like corpse of the Queen, on its car, and the grief-stricken King, who led the train when seen by the flickering light of countless torches, with its solemn dirge music, passing through many a mile of open country in the midnight hours was a vision so unreal that the chronicler describes it as “rather a phantasmagoria than a reality.” In the magnificent abbey of Alcobasa the requiem mass was sung, and the corpse finally laid to rest.

Open Library link

---

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!