The Public Domain Review

In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits. Juliette Bretan takes a trip through Witkiewicz’s chemical forays, including his 1932 Narcotics, a genre-bending treatise that warns of the hazards of drugs while seductively recollecting their delirious effects.

John Bevis' atlas was one of the greatest star charts produced during the Golden Age of the Celestial Atlas.

As Giles learns how to read, in this 18th-century children's book, he consumes an alphabet baked from gingerbread, literally becoming “A little Boy who lived upon Learning”.

Learn about the deletion of a huge archive of book illustrations and sign an open letter to save it.

This photograph of Tesla, produced for The Century Magazine, shows the inventor seated beneath his giant “magnifying transmitter”, arcing 22-foot-long bolts of electricity.

What does the future sound like? In the early 20th century, one answer rang out from Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori — lever-operated machines designed to pop, sough, shriek, and shock. Peter Tracy explores the ambitions behind Italian Futurism’s experiments with noise and the sensory, spiritual, and political affinities of this radical new music.

These landscapes depict worlds populated by animals, where the built environment of humans is relegated to the distant background.

This 227-page volume collects, in wonderfully elaborate style, the signatures of over 75 of Europe’s most illustrious seventeenth-century nobles.

A cryptic, Rosicrucian-inspired text of disputed authorship, featuring engravings rich in alchemical symbolism.

Combing across 19th-century shores, seaweed collectors would wander for hours, tucking specimens into pouches and jars, before pasting their finds into artful albums. Sasha Archibald explores the eros contained in the pressed and illustrated pages of notable algologists, including “the most ambitious album of all” by Charles F. Durant.