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The Public Domain Review

@publicdomainrev.bsky.social

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Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. Featuring 300+ essays — ✍️ submissions welcome. We also have a mighty fine prints shop.

https://publicdomainreview.org

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@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 7:45 PM

Utagawa Hiroshige, Procession to the Torinomachi Festival in the Rice Fields of Asakusa, 1857.⠀
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One of a few Hiroshige prints we've got for sale in our shop: https://publicdomainreview.org/shop/fine-art-prints/artist/utagawa-hiroshige

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 4:47 PM

#SundayReads — @PM_Keeling's essay “Liberal Visions and Boring Machines” drills into the early history of the Channel Tunnel — https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-early-history-of-the-channel-tunnel #eurostar #channeltunnel #leshuttle

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 2:17 PM

Journal of a Few Months’ Residence in Portugal (1847) is a lively travelogue by William Wordsworth’s daughter Dora, recording her observations of the Iberian peninsula: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dorothy-wordsworths-journal-of-a-few-months-residence-in-portugal-1847

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 11:48 AM

Florence Hazrat on Philip Sydney, the uncontested early modern king of brackets and his romance Arcadia, which abruptly ends, like its author’s life, hanging on a parenthesis: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/philip-sidney-and-the-extreme-disgraces-of-the-parenthesis/ #SundayReads

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 10, 2026, 4:46 PM

Were public toilet walls the @Twitter of the 18th century? Maximillian Novak on how a little-known book of “latrinalia” offers a unique and fascinating window into Georgian life: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/tales-from-the-boghouse

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 10, 2026, 2:16 PM

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

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 10, 2026, 11:45 AM

A small pamphlet (in the Roycroft series “Little journeys to the homes of great musicians”) on the life of the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born #onthisday in 1813. Read it here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-pamphlet-on-verdi-1901 #otd

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 9, 2026, 7:45 PM

“The old Irishman taking his pig to market.”

One of several novel banana-based creations found in “Quaint Dessert Dishes”, an article from a 1911 issue of American Homes and Gardens: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/quaint-desserts/ #thanksgiving

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 9, 2026, 4:45 PM

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

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 9, 2026, 2:17 PM

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...

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 9, 2026, 11:48 AM

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)

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 8, 2026, 7:47 PM

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/

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 8, 2026, 4:59 PM

Philipp Otto Runge’s Farbenkugel (1810). The top two images show the surface of the sphere, while the bottom two show horizontal and vertical cross sections.

From our selection of colour charts, wheels and tables through the centuries: publicdomainreview.org/collection/c...

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 8, 2026, 2:17 PM

Divide and concur — this radical plan from 1920, for "lasting peace" after WW1, proposed uniting central Europe into 24 wedge-shaped cantons which would radiate out from Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/unionization-of-central-europe/

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 8, 2026, 11:48 AM

It's #WorldOctopusDay! Pictured here a “Polypus levis Hoyle” from a 1910 publication on the German Deep-Sea Expedition of 1898, led by Leipzig University Professor of Zoology, Carl Chun. Buy it as a print here: https://publicdomainreview.org/product/octopus/

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 7, 2026, 7:45 PM

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

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 7, 2026, 2:17 PM

These 1920s costumes for dancing — more sculpture than clothing — by the avant-garde couple Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, were born of an artistic philosophy of suffering: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/tanzmasken

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 7, 2026, 11:47 AM

#OnThisDay in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe passed away under mysterious circumstances. Of all the artists who gave life to Poe's macabre tales over the years, perhaps none captured them quite so brilliantly as the Irish artist Harry Clarke: publicdomainreview.org/collection/h... #OTD #EdgarAllanPoe

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 7:45 PM

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

@publicdomainrev.bsky.socialOct 6, 2026, 4:48 PM

Pages from Carl Jung’s copy of Mutus Liber (1677), the “mute book”, an alchemical manual charting (through “hieroglyphic figures”) the “humid way” of forging the Philosopher’s Stone. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/mutus-liber/

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