The Public Domain Review

Ethereal illustrations for a book that charts the voices of Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, and other illustrious writers and thinkers from beyond the grave.

Created for US insurance firms during a period of devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail — shops, homes, churches, brothels, and opium dens were equally noted by the company’s cartographers. Tobiah Black explores the history and afterlife of these maps, which have been reclaimed by historians and genealogists seeking proof of the vanished past.

Spanning half a millennium, these images feature a perspective that art historians call the Rückenfigur — a focus on the human back.

An illuminated prayer book woven on mechanical looms programmed by punch card.

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Heat.

Small paintings of eyes that were gifted between lovers in England.

Rococo designs that picture China as a utopian world of pleasure and caprice.

Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love.

A diary kept by a Dutch sailor abandoned on Ascension Island as punishment for having a relationship with another man.

Hollywood's first natural-color feature film and the breakout role for Anna May Wong, considered the first Chinese American movie star.