The Public Domain Review

Illustrations that employ a magic-lantern conceit: the shadow thrown by a spotlit individual can reveal her inner character.

Does a healthy intellectual culture resemble a battlefield or a kitchen? Revisiting Milton’s Areopagitica, a tract often championed by today’s free speech absolutists, Katie Kadue finds a debt to the work of early modern housewives. In their labours to preserve food and transform it into wholesome cuisine, Milton saw an analogue for how the reading public might digest books — good and bad alike — into nourishing ideas.

This Victorian dictionary collects the cant of thieves, the slang of costermongers, and many other argots.

The greatest astronomical work of its age, this Arabic book represents each constellation twice: once from below and once from above.

Curious two-volume illustrated book on bonsai which dispensed not only with the vessels but with the trees themselves.

The introduction of gin to England was a delirious and deleterious affair, as tipplers reported a range of effects: loss of reason, frenzy, madness, joy, and death. With the help of prints by George Cruikshank, William Hogarth, and others, James Brown enters the architecture of intoxication — dram shops, gin halls, barbershops — exploring the spaces that catered to pleasure or evil, depending who you asked.

A work of millennial scope by a self-taught African-American historian.

Manesson’s book encompasses theories of fortifications from their origins in designs developed in the sixteenth century by Michelangelo.

A leatherbound volume of some hundred photocollages, featuring elaborate, fantastical watercolour settings for photographic portraits of friends, family, and pets.

Influencing numerous later animal tales told around the world, the 8th-century Arabic fables of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīlah wa-Dimnah also inspired a rich visual tradition of illustration: jackals on trial, airborne turtles, and unlikely alliances between species. Marina Warner follows these stories as they wander and change across time and place, celebrating their sharp political observation and stimulating mix of humour, earnesty, and melancholy.