The Public Domain Review

Our End-of-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Power.

To mark Lost Species Day, images of 39 recently extinct animals and their stories — from the aurochs to the ivory-billed woodpecker.

When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view. Daisy Sainsbury explores the history of the Musée Dupuytren, and asks what an ethical future might look like for the human specimens it held.

These costumes for dancing, born of an artistic philosophy of suffering, suggest a mongrel collision of characters.

Burlesquing the Augustan era’s fixation on classical tradition, Gay renders practical advice for walking around London into oftentimes absurd verse.

While Haeckel turns jellyfish into baroque spectacles of color and flowing form, Mayer’s medusae are more sober, their tentacles subdued, their umbellate bells transparent.

The recommended cut-off dates to order from our shop by to ensure delivery in time for Dec 25th.

For vast stretches of À la recherche du temps perdu, there is scarcely a page unadorned by vibrant colour. To commemorate the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death, Christopher Prendergast celebrates his use of pink, how its tone shifts from innocence to themes of sexual need, before finally fading out to grey at the novel’s close.

This celestial image has long stumped scholars: is it a lost Renaissance engraving or a nineteenth century pastiche?

Originally printed in a run of one hundred copies, only a half-dozen of which remain, this dangerous book is made from wallpaper laced with arsenic.