The Public Domain Review

Amongst the assorted curiosities described in Olaus Magnus' 1555 tome on Nordic life was the morse — a hirsuite, fearsome, walrus-like beast, that was said to snooze upon cliffs while hanging by its teeth. Natalie Lawrence explores the career of this chimerical wonder, shaped both by scholarly images of a fabulous north and the grisly corporeality of the trade in walrus skins, teeth, and bone.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld's controversial poem which presciently imagines a future Britain in ruin, eclipsed by the rising might of America.

Series of fantastic anthropomorphic maps of European countries, each footnoted by a witty quatrain, was produced by London publisher Hodder and Stoughton in the 1860s.

15th-century how-to guide in the art of combat, including unarmed, with daggers, swords, poleaxes and on horseback.

The Berlin of the 1920s is often associated with a certain image of excess and decadence, but it was a quite different side of the city — the sobriety and desolation of its industrial and working-class districts — which came to obsess the painter Gustav Wunderwald. Mark Hobbs explores.

This delightful book features a collection of nineteenth-century textile samples — in the form of watercolour copies — from the Robert Maison company.

Strangely alluring images from a report by German zoologist Ludwig Heinrich Philipp Döderlein on starfish collected during the Siboga Expedition around Indonesia.

Collection of acerbic animal fables, penned by the likes of Honoré de Balzac and George Sand, and illustrated by the brilliant J. J. Grandville.

Gardening lessons from the late 1920s, centreing on the cultivation of beans, including some wonderful time-lapse footage and inter-titles to match.

John Bevis explores the various feats of cunning and subterfuge undertaken by the Kearton brothers — among the very first professional wildlife photographers — in their pioneering attempts to get ever closer to their subjects.