The Public Domain Review

@publicdomainrev
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Not-for-profit project dedicated to exploring curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas — focusing on works now fallen into the public domain.

Smaller posts surface images, books, audio, and film (sourced from places like Internet Archive, Library of Congress, The Met, Rijksmusuem, Wellcome, etc.) — and we've also 300+ long-form essays (✍️ submissions welcome!)

Here we'll mostly be tooting about content on our site. 🎺

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The Public Domain Review34m ago

Emblems from a unique scrapbook containing a collection of cut out emblems featured in juvenile literature. Subjects include “folly of drunkenness”, “the danger of misspending time”, and “upon a little girl’s playing with a painted baby”.

More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/scrapbook-of-hand-coloured-juvenile-woodcut-emblems

The Public Domain Review6h ago

“Human Statue of Liberty” comprised of 18,000 officers and men at Camp Dodge, Des Moines, ca. 1917/18.

A “living photograph“ made by Arthur Mole and John Thomas — more here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-living-photographs-of-mole-and-thomas

The Public Domain Review8h ago
In the early 16th century Albrecht Durer produced 6 woodcuts of knot patterns, likely inspired by Mamluk decorative metalwork. Each knot is a group of intricately entwined infinity loops made up of repeating patterns that follow circular paths: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/durer-knots/
The Public Domain Review1d ago
Le Petit Journal des Refusées ran to a grand total of one issue, published in the summer of 1896. At just 16 pages, printed on wallpaper in a trapezoid shape, it purported to have only one condition for inclusion — rejection from a “leading magazine”... https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/le-petit-journal-des-refusees/
The Public Domain Review1d ago
Nikolai Agnivtsev’s Little Screw (1925) — a Soviet children’s book about a modest factory screw whose importance is overlooked. Read on our site, and also watch a 1927 animated version of the story: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/little-screw/
The Public Domain Review1d ago

Banana Tree Flower with Io Moth, by Maria Sibylla Merian — who was born #onthisday in 1647.

From her pioneering Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Insects of Suriname), first published in 1705.

See more prints by her in our online prints shop: https://publicdomainreview.org/shop/fine-art-prints/artist/maria-sibylla-merian

The Public Domain Review2d ago
One of a series of early 17th-century engravings depicting imaginary utopias and dystopias, illustrations for The City of Truth, or, Ethics (1609), Bartolomeo Del Bene's poetic reworking of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-city-of-truth-or-ethics-1609
The Public Domain Review2d ago
Read the remarkable story of Mary Toft who claimed to have given birth to rabbits — an elaborate 18th-century hoax which had King George I’s own court physicians fooled: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/mary-toft-and-her-extraordinary-delivery-of-rabbits
The Public Domain Review2d ago
.@ResObscura on the story of George Psalmanazar, the mysterious Frenchman who successfully posed as a native of Formosa (now Taiwan) and gave birth to a meticulously fabricated culture with bizarre customs, exotic fashions, and its own invented language: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/made-in-taiwan-how-a-frenchman-fooled-18th-century-london
The Public Domain Review2d ago
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, fell for one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century when he became convinced that the "fairy photographs" taken by two girls from Yorkshire in the 1920s were real. Mary Losure explores: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/sir-arthur-and-the-fairies #AprilFools