The Public Domain Review

An account of being confined in Ticehurst, a private asylum in Victorian Britain, by the author Herman Charles Merivale.

Victorian sexuality is often considered synonymous with prudishness, conjuring images of covered up piano legs and dark ankle-length skirts. Historian Matthew Green uncovers a quite different scene in the sordid story of Holywell St, 19th-century London's epicentre of erotica and smut.

Images from an exquisitely illustrated Persian translation, thought to hail from 17th-century Mughal India, of Zakariya al-Qazwini's medieval treatise on all things wondrous.

Illustrated by George Cruikshank among others, a collection of word, number, and picture puzzles in the form of enigmas, conundrums, acrostics, and a series of incredibly tricky rebuses.

Collection of stellated and uniform polyhedra belonging to Max Brückner , a German geometer.

It is 200 years since The Year Without a Summer, when a sun-obscuring ash cloud — ejected from one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history — caused temperatures to plummet the world over. Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks at the humanitarian crisis triggered by the unusual weather, and how it offers an alternative lens through which to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a book begun in its midst.

Fine specimen of a 19th-century seaweed album, in which marine algae is rendered into designs, bouquets, and even sometimes intricate little scenes.

16th-century Dutch engraving depicting a fantastical animal with the heads of various other animals sprouting from its body: an allegory for the difficulty of ruling over a diverse nation.

One of the earliest works by the American parodist Guy Wetmore Carryl, this collection of fables are adapted from Jean de La Fontaine's Aesop-style originals from more than 200 years earlier.

A film by the pioneering Spanish film director, cinematographer and screenwriter Segundo Chomón.