The Public Domain Review

While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition. Claire Hall explores various shades of this idea in ancient philosophy, from Pythagorean metempsychosis to Stoic predictions about a cosmological reset.

More than 70 images of the magical, hallucinogenic, and perilous mandrake.

A broadside illustration depicting the execution of an alchemist, hanged upon a gallows made from the very object of his crime.

A literary magazine whose criterion for acceptance was simple: each piece had to have been previously rejected.

Richard Owen, the Victorian scientist who first named the “dinosaurs”, claimed that he could identify an animal, even an extinct one, from inspecting a single bone. Richard Fallon revisits other Owen-inspired fictions — by R. D. Blackmore, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley — and finds literature layered with scientific, religious, and political interventions, spurred by the discovery of prehistoric life.

A treatise on the challenges facing workers — and potential solutions — that advocates socialism at the turn of the 20th century.

Stereographs depicting daily life in Palestine before the British Mandate.

Aquatint engravings that were employed to reproduce the tonal subtleties of drawings.

In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth.

A chemistry treatise that weds the hard sciences with theosophical insight, making a microscope of the psychic mind.