The Public Domain Review

In the 1850s, as photography took its first steps toward commercial reproducibility, a more intimate use for light-sensitive plates briefly bloomed. It had a few names: heliographic drawing, photographic autography, or, as it is best known today, cliché-verre. Miya Tokumitsu takes us to the towns and forests of France where a group of friends began making marks on photographic plates, and finds their camaraderie cohere in lyrical arrangements of topography and light.

Handmade book showing Paul Claudel's scenario, with illustrations by Audrey Parr and Hélène Hoppenot, for Darius Milhaud's ballet L'homme et son desir.

The recommended cut-off dates to order from our shop by to ensure delivery in time for Dec 25th.

19th-century German chromolithographs of paper lanterns, the kind used to celebrate St. Martin's Day.

Levitation was the last thing Teresa of Avila wanted. It drew the wrong kind of attention and embarrassed her in public. She tried to remain grounded, clinging to furniture when the weightlessness set in, and then suddenly, it stopped for good. Carlos Eire reads Teresa's autobiographic Vida and finds the 16th-century saint complaining to God about the aethrobatic miracles that he forced her to endure.

An examination of the three books that Frankenstein's monster reads to educate himself about human life.

A big batch of new prints is added to our online shop — and also free shipping, and discounts on multiple orders.

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.