The Public Domain Review

Colorful illustrations of four-legged creatures first included in Buffon’s pioneering eighteenth-century books on natural history.

Privately published memoir of an American portraitist who grew up in a log cabin and went on to paint presidents, congressmen, philanthropists, and Daniel Boone.

Impressive Victorian lithographs of Anglo-Saxon and early Irish illuminated manuscripts from the dark ages and early medieval period.

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.