The Public Domain Review

Frontispiece by Jay van Everen for American folklorist Parker Fillmore's The Laughing Prince: A Book of Yugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1921). Read the (loosely adapted) stories, and see more illustrations, on our website: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fillmore-the-laughing-prince

Over 150 yrs ago, George Perkins Marsh urged his readers to consider the disastrous environmental effects of deforestation, over-mining, and other human actions. Read more about this remarkable thinker and his extraordinary book, Man and Nature (1864) publicdomainreview.org/collection/m...

From a triptych known as “Cats for the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (ca. 1847) — a spoof of the popular Japanese prints subject depicting the Edo to Kyoto coastal road.
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Available as a print from our online shop — publicdomainreview.org/product/c... #caturday

To raise money for the project we sell beautiful prints through our online shop. Superb archival quality. Unframed or framed ready to hang. Explore our collection of 900+ images here: publicdomainreview.org/shop/f...

And see our gift cards here: publicdomainreview.org/shop/gift-cards/undefined...

#SundayReads: A. D. Manns on the speculative origins of Aradia, "the Gospel of the Witches"... https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/roma-lister-aradia/

It's easy enough to identify the three protagonists as Adam, Eve and the Devil, but what are they doing in the water? A peculiar representation of the Temptation? Sarah Toulouse from @BibChampsLibres explores: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-other-lives-of-adam-and-eve

With its various and playful explorations of authenticity — "found documents", metafictional games with readers, etc. — The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg, anticipates some of postmodernism's best trickery: http://buff.ly/2p3UZIt

The rather baffling entry for “X” in The Merry Cobler and His Musical Alphabet (ca. 1800). See the other 25 letters here: http://buff.ly/1QGXAjR

And more examples of how the letter “X” has been treated in alphabet books here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/x-is-for

#OnThisDay in 1916 Jack London died aged just 40. A year earlier he'd published his last book, The Star Rover — a strange tale about solitary confinement and interstellar reincarnation, which speaks of the dreams and struggles of the man himself: publicdomainreview.org/essay/a... #OTD

Contents of an ostrich’s stomach extracted after its death. Taken at the Zoological Society of London, ca. 1930: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/contents-of-an-ostrich-s-stomach-ca-1930

In Greenwich Village, there used to be “sand hills, sometimes rising to a height of 100 feet, while to the south was a marsh tenanted by wild fowl and crossed by a brook flowing from the north.” More deep history of NYC in Charles Hemstreet’s 1899 book:
publicdomainreview.org/collection/n...

#OnThisDay in 1811, on a lake’s edge near Potsdam, a 34-yr-old Kleist shot himself dead in a suicide pact with his terminally ill lover. He left behind him just under a decade of intense literary output. Steven Howe explores his first dramatic work: publicdomainreview.org/essay/t... #OTD

Blue Grotto (Capri Island, Italy), by Detroit Publishing Co., ca. 1890.⁠
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One of 900+ prints available as a print from our online shop, all profits back into the project — https://publicdomainreview.org/product/blue-grotto-capri-island-italy

If you'd like delivery before Dec 25th (and these would make mighty fine gifts!) then please do get your order in before 1st December.

As always, all profits from the shop go straight back into The Public Domain Review — helping us commission new essays, unearth more images, and keep the project freely available to everyone.

Composite image showing 6 t-shirts in a grid

Composite image showing 6 mugs in a grid

Adorn your body and coffee in PDR goodness!!!
We’ve just added 8 new T-shirts (now 100% organic cotton) and 13 new mugs to our online shop.

T-shirts: publicdomainreview.org/shop/t-shirts/
Mugs: publicdomainreview.org/shop/mugs/

Plate from M. E. Descourtilz’s Atlas des Champignons (1827), a delightful series of colour lithographs of mushrooms, divided into those that are edible, poisonous and “suspect” — https://publicdomainreview.org/coll.../atlas-des-champignons

Albert Alberg's Frost Flowers on the Window (1899) communicates a “new, truly great discovery”, that frost is able to make “ice photographs”, expressing the form of objects near it — https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/frost-flowers

(Image: ca. 1905 photograph of frost by Wilson Bentley)

Triptych by Kawanabe Kyōsai depicting a battle of frogs, 1864.
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Kyōsai is considered both Japan’s first political caricaturist and one of the first authors of a manga magazine (Eshunbun Nipponchi).
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Prints to buy here: https://publicdomainreview.org/shop/fine-art-prints/artist/kawanabe-kyosai

The Berlin of the 1920s is often associated with a certain excess and decadence, but it was a different side of the city — the “sobriety and desolation” of its industrial and working-class districts — which came to obsess the painter Gustav Wunderwald: publicdomainreview.org/essay/g...

One of the first books to be banned and burnt in the New World was by an ancestor of the author Thomas Pynchon. More in our essay by Daniel Crown “The Price of Suffering”: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-price-of-suffering-william-pynchon-and-the-meritorious-price-of-our-redemption

Throughout his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel #Proust (who died #onthisday in 1922) would time and again turn to the visual arts. Explore here the artworks he mentions including paintings by Giotto, Botticelli and Poussin: publicdomainreview.org/collection/p... #OTD

The precise meaning of the Fool’s Cap Map of the World (ca. 1585) remains a mystery. Does the fool represent our world, the vain strivings of its denizens? Or the futility of cartography itself? See the post on our website: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fools-cap-map-of-the-world/

Utagawa Hiroshige, Chinese Lantern Plants as Children at Play, ca. 1842.

Print available in our shop, and more Hiroshige here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/utagawa-hiroshige-last-great-master-of-ukiyo-e/

Centuries ahead of its time, Giovanni Battista Bracelli's "Bizzarie di Varie Figure" (1624) depicts figures made from a range of objects, mostly abstract — cubes, rings, squares — but also such things as rackets, screws, and braided hair.

More here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/b...

19th-century drugstore ad in verse, from a “commercial rhymist”.

More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/rhyming-drugstore-advertisements-1885

Solar Eclipse, 1880.

Supposedly of the January 11, 1880, solar eclipse from California's Mount Santa Lucia. Although attributed by @GettyMuseum to Carleton Watkins, some scholars doubt this to be the case.
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Available as a print from our shop here: publicdomainreview.org/product/s...

PDR Shop update: Last order dates for Dec 25 delivery are out! 🎄 🎁

Please get your orders in early. All profits back into the project ❤️

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/11/last-order-dates-for-christmas-2025/

#SundayReads: Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/machiavelli-and-the-emergence-of-the-private-study

Winnie Wong brings us a short biography of the Chinese curioso Pan Youxun (1745-1780). At issue? Hubris, hegemony, and global art history: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/lover-of-the-strange-sympathizer-of-the-rude-barbarianologist-of-the-farthest-peripheries/