The Public Domain Review

A Renaissance guide to dieting that Nietzsche thought was the second most harmful book.

A nine volume series that faithfully reproduced virtually all pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican books in European collections at the time.

When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books. Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin explore this paradoxical sign of interiority and find a class of image that traverses the poles of absorption and theatricality.

Photographs of wild flowers taken by photographers from a Christian utopian community that settled in East Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century.

A 650-page philological foray into ancient sexuality, surprisingly light on STDs.

A “part-talkie” that offers a simple solution to modern urban isolation: love.

The sight of a skeletal corpse rarely inspires a rollicking jig. Yet for more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead. Allison C. Meier tracks the motif’s evolution across history, discovering how — through times of disease, war, and economic inequality — printmaking offered a means to both critique social ills and reflect upon new forms of human devastation.

The only fully illustrated herbal from the incunabula period of German history.

Macrophotographs of a myriad array of creepy crawlies, captured with the help of a 20-foot long camera.

A 17th-century treatise on women’s right to education, written by an exceptional polyglot.