The Public Domain Review

A map and pamphlet that proposes dividing Central Europe into 24 sector-shaped cantons, among other eccentric reforms aimed at peace.

Skeletal illustrations supposedly replicating a lost manuscript by a wine and women–loving Zen monk.

Characterised today by the noise of banging, buzzers, and the cries of inmates, solitary confinement was originally developed from Quaker ideas about the redemptive power of silence, envisioned as a humane alternative to the punitive violence of late-18th century jails. Revisiting Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Jane Brox discovers the spiritual origins and reformist ambitions of solitary’s early advocates, and sees their supposedly progressive desires come to ruin by the 20th century.

The first book-length history of Halloween, written when the author was a mere twenty-six years old.

Photographs of fire tests carried out at the turn of the century to keep women’s clothing from catching on fire.

A collection of prints by eight artists envisioning a new Tokyo.

Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a path that leads both upward and downward: up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth.

Containing 405 alphabet specimens from 164 languages, the book is a treasure chest for the epigraphical imagination.

Details of a whole raft of important changes aimed at improving how we communicate rights labelling and championing those institutions openly sharing public domain works.

Käthe Kollwitz's etchings based on the German Peasants’ War and a mysterious woman called Black Anna.