The Public Domain Review

Stunning set of images from a 16th-century treatise on comets.

The second of our free colouring books, including works by Walter Crane, Jessie M. King, and Arthur Rackham.

Julian Chehirian goes looking for the history of telecommunication, and is left sitting in the slim shadow of a lightning rod, listening to a voice from beyond the grave.

A surprising and vividly written late Victorian compendium of local British lore and traditions.

Weighing in at a colossal 18,000 lines, Herman Melville's Clarel (1876), which centres on the theological musings of a group of pilgrims touring the Holy Land, is not for the faint-hearted. Jeff Wheelwright explores the knot of spiritual dilemmas played out in the poem and its roots in Melville's trip to the Middle East two decades earlier.

Our postcard sets sent to Friends of the PDR in summer will be themed on "touch"

Stylised herbal including plants with faces and dragon-like roots, in addition to more naturalistic depictions.

Illustrations by a little-known Brazilian artist for the first French translation of H. G. Wells’ science-fiction classic.

Article about the emotional life of the passenger pigeon, including musical notation of its songs, kahs, and coos.

Living through the devastating Italian plague of 1656, the great polymath Athanasius Kircher turned his ever-enquiring mind to the then mysterious disease, becoming possibly the first to view infected blood through a microscope. While his subsequent theories of spontaneous generation and "universal sperm" were easily debunked, Kircher's investigation can be seen as an important early step to understanding contagion, and perhaps even the very first articulation of germ theory. John Glassie explores.