The Public Domain Review

The first book-length history of Halloween, written when the author was a mere twenty-six years old.

Photographs of fire tests carried out at the turn of the century to keep women’s clothing from catching on fire.

A collection of prints by eight artists envisioning a new Tokyo.

Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a path that leads both upward and downward: up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth.

Containing 405 alphabet specimens from 164 languages, the book is a treasure chest for the epigraphical imagination.

Details of a whole raft of important changes aimed at improving how we communicate rights labelling and championing those institutions openly sharing public domain works.

Käthe Kollwitz's etchings based on the German Peasants’ War and a mysterious woman called Black Anna.

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.