The Public Domain Review

Eleven lithographs of Java from drawings by an eccentric Dutch colonial explorer who believed elevation equals greatness.

According to his memoirs, Eugène-François Vidocq escaped from more than twenty prisons (sometimes dressed as a nun). Working on the other side of the law, he apprehended some 4000 criminals with a team of plainclothes agents. He founded the first criminal investigation bureau — staffed mainly with convicts — and, when he was later fired, the first private detective agency. He was one the fathers of modern criminology and had a rap sheet longer than his very tall tales. Who was Vidocq? Daisy Sainsbury investigates.

A genre-defying work by the creator of Peter Pan about the pleasures of smoking.

Beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public.

Prints made using a technique known as blackwork which flourished from the 1580s to the 1620s.

In the public domain at last, Steamboat Willie debuted both Mickey Mouse and cartoon synchronised sound to a widespread audience.

Soon after Clementina Hawarden began taking photographs in the mid-19th century, her eye caught on doubles, reflections, her daughters glimpsed in the mirror. Stassa Edwards examines the role that reproduction — photographic, biological — plays in this oeuvre, and searches for the only person not captured clearly: Hawarden herself.

A compilation of silhouette portraits by the artist Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904), which includes short biographies, picture riddles, and poems.

A science fiction novel about optography — the scientific belief that images could be recovered from the eyes and brains of the dead.

More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism.