The Public Domain Review

Like fast food and snacks, the short story has been derided as minor cuisine, ephemeral and insubstantial, light fare compared to the novel’s sustenance. For Katherine Mansfield, a great master of the form, eating offered a model for the sensuous consumption of her fiction — stories, in turn, that are filled with scenes of alimentary pleasure. On the centenary of the New Zealand writer’s death, Aimée Gasston samples her appetites.

This reference manual for commercial bakeries includes striking pasted-in silver bromide prints and dazzling chromolithographs of bread.

Created sometime around 1889 by Beatrice and Walter Crane, this illustrated series of poems personifies the months of the year as women.

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.

From a 1904 study of queer Berlin to the mysteries of a hole-punched archive, a rundown of the ten most read pieces we published this year.

We've made an index for the site, to track chance resonances, collect accidental symmetries, and chart themes that only become visible on an indexical scale.

Working as an astronomy teacher in Lone Tree, Iowa, Ellen Harding Baker quilted this magnificent representation of the cosmos for her students.

Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.

Mighty Mikko contains twelve stories loosely based on Finnish tales, illustrated with vibrant block prints by Jay Van Everen.

The architect and historian Anthony Acciavatti uses a real (but mostly forgotten) patent to conjure a world that could have been.