The Public Domain Review

Proto science fiction fantasy romance of an English castaway and a remote race of flying humans.

Meiji era copies (ca. 1900) of original designs by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), a Japanese painter of the mid-Edo period notable for his striking modern aesthetic.

Book featuring a hundred real or real-ish tales of ingenious, loyal or otherwise extraordinary animals.

Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances — Urte Laukaityte on how a craze for sessions of "animal magnetism" in late 18th-century Paris led to the randomised placebo-controlled and double-blind clinical trials we know and love today.

Poems from the Victorian era and before which anticipated 21st-century textspeak.

Photographs for official army panoramas that offer, a century after their strategic function has passed, an unusual and haunting portrait of WW1.

Book of Norwegian fairytales and one of the finest creations to emerge from the golden age of illustration.

Does each species have an optimal form? An ideal beauty that existed prior to the Fall? These were questions that concerned both artists and breeders alike in the 17th century. Dániel Margócsy on the search for a menagerie of perfect prelapsarian geometry.

Remarkable depictions of nudibranchs from the waters of the Philippines in the early 20th century.

Babylonian and Assyrian incantations against various demons, ghouls, vampires, hobgoblins, ghosts, and evil spirits.