The Public Domain Review

Photographs demonstrating the process of embalming, from The Champion Text Book on Embalming, published in 1897.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, author of one of the best-loved and most frequently illustrated books in the history of literature — Don Quixote. Rachel Schmidt explores how the varying approaches to illustrating the tale have reflected and impacted its reading through the centuries.

Translating as Smile of April, this is a waltz composed by the French composer Maurice Depret performed by The Columbia Symphony Orchestra.

A woodblock print, by the late Edo period artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, illustrating the story of an encounter with the Sea Monk or Umibozu, a spirit in Japanese folklore.

A wonderfully eclectic treatise on all things sundials and roses — jam-packed with photographs, illustrations, and diagrams.

Diagrams showing the postures of the mouth when demonstrating proper elocution, from a 19th-century book dedicated to elocution.

With the twenty-six short comic dialogues that made up Dialogues of the Gods, the 2nd-century writer Lucian of Samosata took the popular images of the Greek gods and re-drew them as greedy, sex-obsessed, power-mad despots. Nicholas Jeeves explores the story behind the work and its reception in the English speaking world.

One of the first of the immensely popular 18th-century "it-narratives", the tale of coin and the human intrigue to which it finds itself bearing witness.

A Pan Am promotional film marketing transatlantic air travel at the dawn of the jet age, including their pioneering Flight 1000, with gourmet meals and spacious powder rooms.

Colour analysis charts of various objects, such as Assyrian tiles, Persian rugs, a case containing an Egyptian mummy, and even a teacup and saucer — looking at times like some kind of strange fusion of De Stijl abstraction and Tetris.