The Public Domain Review

Images from John Bulwer's 17th-century study on the language of the hands and gesture.

On the centenary of Jack London’s death, Benjamin Breen looks at the writer’s last book to be published in his lifetime, The Star Rover — a strange tale about solitary confinement and interstellar reincarnation, which speaks to us of the dreams and struggles of the man himself.

The oldest known surviving film made by an African-American director, portraying the contemporary racial situation in the United States during the early twentieth century.

Long before the current craze for adult colouring books came this 19th-century painting book from one of the finest contributors to the Golden Age of illustration.

Depictions spanning more than 800 years – in chronological order – of that most enigmatic of weather phenomena, the rainbow.

Three hundred years after the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and seven hundred years after the birth of Ramon Llull, Jonathan Gray looks at how their early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” speak to our own age of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Collection of alphabets comprised of the human body.

Short film by Georges Méliès, released through his Star Film Company, featuring demons, flames, spectres, and a brilliant array of the film-maker's usual arsenal of tricks.

The Principle Navigations, Richard Hakluyt's great championing of Elizabethan colonial exploration, remains one of the most important collections of English travel writing ever published. As well as the escapades of famed names such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, Nandini Das looks at how the book preserves many stories of lesser known figures that surely would have been otherwise lost.

Bats galore featured on plate 67 from Ernst Haeckel’s visually dazzling Kunstformen der Natur (1904).