The Public Domain Review

IMAGE: French cartoon from around 1865 showing a man riding on a bicycle-like flyin…

A short and wonderfully illustrated version of the Cinderella tale most probably dating from the early 19th century (no date can be made out in the book itself).

Stassa Edwards explores Charles Darwin's photography collection, which included almost forty portraits of mental patients given to him by the neurologist James Crichton-Browne. The study of these photographs, and the related correspondence between the two men, would prove instrumental in the development of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin's study on the evolution of emotions.

A stunning series of letterforms designed in the mid-17th century, writhing forms which hover somewhere between the monstrous and floral

An English translation of a collection of twenty short "prose-songs" (as the Foreword declares them) from the French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), a key figure of the late 19th-century French symbolist movement.

DESIGN:”The duck quaketh… the goose gaggleth”, the animal so…

A remarkable series of amateur reels, amounting to more than 6 hours in total, covering the 1939–40 New York World's Fair which took place on a 1,216 acre area of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and which saw over 44 million people in attendance.

Photograohs of the 1937 Nantucket sea-serpent hoax

IMAGE: Plate 93 from Ernst Haeckel’s visually dazzling Kunstformen der Nat…

In the mid 17th-century John Comenius published what many consider to be the first picture book dedicated to the education of young children, Orbis Sensualium Pictus - or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures, as it was rendered in English. Charles McNamara explores how, contrary to Comenius' declarations, the book can be seen to be as much about the invisible world as the visible.