The Public Domain Review

From gift-bestowing sparrows and peach-born heroes to goblin spiders and dancing phantom cats — in a series of beautifully illustrated books, the majority printed on an unusual cloth-like crepe paper, the publisher Takejiro Hasegawa introduced Japanese folk tales to the West. Christopher DeCou on how a pioneering cross-cultural endeavour gave rise to a magnificent chapter in the history of children's publishing.

Over a century before the invention of the e-reader, a French bibliophile imagines how advances in phonographic technology might spell the end of all printed text.

Remarkable collection of photographs documenting the eccentric roadside architecture and ephemera of America.

An account of the early serial killers, Burke and Hare, and the medical demand for corpses that fueled these murders.

Used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for millennia, it was only in the last decade of the 19th century that the powerful effects of mescaline began to be systematically explored by curious non-indigenous Americans and Europeans. Mike Jay looks at one such pioneer Havelock Ellis who, along with his small circle of fellow artists and writers, documented in wonderful detail his psychedelic experiences.

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám has inspired parodies by cat lovers and car lovers. But it seems to have found a special place in the hearts of golfers.

The enigmatic story of the Unicorn Tapestries, whose multifarious medieval symbolism still beguiles.

Poe’s story of a treasure hunt, revealing the fantastical writer’s hyper-rational penchant for cracking codes.

The Victorian artist and writer turns his peculiar brand of verbal and visual invention to the world of plant taxonomy.

Though the 17th-century whaling station of Smeerenburg was in reality, at its height, just a few dwellings and structures for processing blubber, over the decades and centuries a more extravagant picture took hold — that there once had stood, defying its far-flung Arctic location, a bustling urban centre complete with bakeries, churches, gambling dens, and brothels. Matthew H. Birkhold explores the legend.