The Public Domain Review

Jé Wilson charts the migration of the Lustucru figure through the French cultural imagination — from misogynistic blacksmith bent on curbing female empowerment, to child-stealing bogeyman, to jolly purveyor of packaged pasta.

How alphabet books dealt with the letter X before the rise of x-rays and xylophones.

John Martin's epic mezzotint illustrations for John Milton's classic tale of falling from paradise.

From the golden age of the microscope, a book on the animalcules that infuse stagnant water, undetectable to the naked eye.

Very early animation in which puppets get up to various routines, including wrestling, fencing, and what appears to be a short bout of bum smacking.

Walt Whitman’s influence on the creative output of 20th-century Russia — particularly in the years surrounding the 1917 Revolution — was enormous. For the 200th anniversary of Whitman's birth, Nina Murray looks at the translators through which Russians experienced his work, not only in a literary sense — through the efforts of Konstantin Balmont and Kornei Chukovsky — but also artistic, in the avant-garde printmaking of Vera Ermolaeva.

One of history's most idiosyncratic artist signatures, composed entirely of writhing creatures.

Feminist and novelist Alicia Little's intimate and unique insight into rural Chinese life at the end of the nineteenth century.

Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the Scottish artist’s original, idiosyncratic, and occasionally bewildering aesthetics.

Photographs of plants captured in extraordinary detail, as if under the microscope, frozen into new forms almost beyond recognition.