The Public Domain Review

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.

Inventor Robert Pittis Scott's Cycling Art offers a whimsical and illustrated tour through the previous century of “man-motor locomotion”.

Five-part mineralogical handbook containing more than four hundred vividly hand-colored engravings of various rocks, minerals, and compounds.

Bruegel's drawing, based on a proverb and subject to numerous adaptations, relates the natural world to injustice: the feeling that human predation is innately born and instinctive.

After the passing of William James — philosopher, early psychologist, and investigator of psychic phenomena — mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor. Channelling these fragmentary voices, Alicia Puglionesi considers the relationship between communication, reputation, and survival after death.

Completed in his early twenties, Dürer's pillow studies seem to slip between the waking world and the stuff of dreams.

Arthur Wesley Dow's influential arts education handbook fused Japanese ukiyo-e with the author's unique minimalism, which he derived from the landscapes of New England.

This turn-of-the-century guide to pigeon breeds marries the concerns of fanciers with the evolutionary theories of naturalists.

From the vast confines of his imaginary prisons to the billowy scenes that comprise his grotteschi, the early works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi wed the exacting details of first-hand observation with the farthest reaches of artistic imagination. Susan Stewart journeys through this 18th-century engraver-architect’s paper worlds.