The Public Domain Review

Toward the end of World War I, as the US peddled hard its Liberty Bonds for the war effort, goldfish dealer Franklin Barrett bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism. Laurel Waycott uncovers the story of this “Liberty Bond Fish” and the wider use of animals in propaganda of the time.

In his final work, William Fairfield Warren set out to become a cartographer of the poetic imagination, mapping Milton’s cosmos in Paradise Lost.

Composed in numbered squares, six to a page, these images are colourful and complex odes to marble.

Engorged with bons mots and brimming with pith, this investigation, in its author’s own words, moves between “the hot sword-play of polemic” and “the chill spade-work of research”.

During the summer of 1895, in a Brooklyn park, there was a cotton plantation complete with five hundred Black workers reenacting slavery. Dorothy Berry uncovers the bizarre and complex history of Black America, a theatrical production which revealed the conflicting possibilities of self-expression in a racist society.

The Florentine engraver imagines an expedition to a lunar landscape peopled by New World figures in fantastical, size-shifting scenarios.

A sample book of gorgeous French silk in various patterns, from around 1900, from the Mary Ann Beinecke Decorative Art Collection.

Méliès shows customary boundless imagination in this short film depicting the pleasures and terrors that plague the drunken baron.

What if chairs had the ability to shift our state of consciousness, transporting the imagination into distant landscapes and ecstatic experiences, both religious and erotic? In an essay about the British and American fascination with rocking chairs and upholstery springs in the 19th century, Hunter Dukes discovers how simple furniture technologies allowed armchair travelers to explore worlds beyond their own.

17th-century treatise, the first book of its kind, containing a bestiary of linen creations, mythical creatures and architectural abstractions, folded out of the common napkin.