The Public Domain Review

A woodblock print, by the late Edo period artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, illustrating the story of an encounter with the Sea Monk or Umibozu, a spirit in Japanese folklore.

A wonderfully eclectic treatise on all things sundials and roses — jam-packed with photographs, illustrations, and diagrams.

Diagrams showing the postures of the mouth when demonstrating proper elocution, from a 19th-century book dedicated to elocution.

With the twenty-six short comic dialogues that made up Dialogues of the Gods, the 2nd-century writer Lucian of Samosata took the popular images of the Greek gods and re-drew them as greedy, sex-obsessed, power-mad despots. Nicholas Jeeves explores the story behind the work and its reception in the English speaking world.

One of the first of the immensely popular 18th-century "it-narratives", the tale of coin and the human intrigue to which it finds itself bearing witness.

A Pan Am promotional film marketing transatlantic air travel at the dawn of the jet age, including their pioneering Flight 1000, with gourmet meals and spacious powder rooms.

Colour analysis charts of various objects, such as Assyrian tiles, Persian rugs, a case containing an Egyptian mummy, and even a teacup and saucer — looking at times like some kind of strange fusion of De Stijl abstraction and Tetris.

A charming alphabet book, dating from around 1800, published by the Glasgow-based publishers J. Lumsden and Son.

Championed in his day by friend and fellow mystic W. B. Yeats, today the artist William T. Horton and his stark minimalistic creations are largely forgotten. Jon Crabb on a unique and unusual talent.

Photographs of injured American Civil War soldiers created by Reed B. Bontecou, a New York surgeon who played a key role in documenting the very many casualties of the Civil War battlefields.