The Public Domain Review

Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind.

In "stream of time" charts, Friedrich Strass and later artists depict human history as bodies of flowing water.

In the Renaissance ostentatio genitalium tradition, the visual virility of Christ affirms his divinity.

In the affecting work of sensory history, Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first.

Mary Gartside's Essay antedates James Sowerby’s and Goethe’s treatises on colour, while its illustrations have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting.

In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits. Juliette Bretan takes a trip through Witkiewicz’s chemical forays, including his 1932 Narcotics, a genre-bending treatise that warns of the hazards of drugs while seductively recollecting their delirious effects.

John Bevis' atlas was one of the greatest star charts produced during the Golden Age of the Celestial Atlas.

As Giles learns how to read, in this 18th-century children's book, he consumes an alphabet baked from gingerbread, literally becoming “A little Boy who lived upon Learning”.

Learn about the deletion of a huge archive of book illustrations and sign an open letter to save it.

This photograph of Tesla, produced for The Century Magazine, shows the inventor seated beneath his giant “magnifying transmitter”, arcing 22-foot-long bolts of electricity.