The Public Domain Review

While nowadays he might be best known for the cut of meat that bears his name, François-René de Chateaubriand was once one of the most famous men in France — a giant of the literary scene and idolised by such future greats as Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo. Alex Andriesse explores Chateaubriand's celebrity and the glimpse behind the public mask we are given in his epic autobiography Memoirs From Beyond the Grave.

The first paper to link carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and earth heating.

Wonderful series of proto-Art Deco adverts for a Cincinnati-based ink company.

Account of a Virginian slave's daring escape from his plantation in a box and subsequent life as a free man.

Exquisite photographs of tsuba, or sword guards, from medieval and early modern Japan.

When the existence of unicorns, and the curative powers of the horns ascribed to them, began to be questioned, one Danish physician pushed back through curious means — by reframing the unicorn as an aquatic creature of the northern seas. Natalie Lawrence on a fascinating convergence of established folklore, nascent science, and pharmaceutical economy.

Colorful illustrations of four-legged creatures first included in Buffon’s pioneering eighteenth-century books on natural history.

Privately published memoir of an American portraitist who grew up in a log cabin and went on to paint presidents, congressmen, philanthropists, and Daniel Boone.

Impressive Victorian lithographs of Anglo-Saxon and early Irish illuminated manuscripts from the dark ages and early medieval period.

From gift-bestowing sparrows and peach-born heroes to goblin spiders and dancing phantom cats — in a series of beautifully illustrated books, the majority printed on an unusual cloth-like crepe paper, the publisher Takejiro Hasegawa introduced Japanese folk tales to the West. Christopher DeCou on how a pioneering cross-cultural endeavour gave rise to a magnificent chapter in the history of children's publishing.