Reading is a form of necromancy, a way to summon and commune once again with the dead, but in what ersatz temple should such a ritual take place? Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and finds a space where words mediate the world and the self.| The Public Domain Review
James Nasymth's images of intricate models of the lunar surface.| The Public Domain Review
By the time of Albert Kahn’s death in 1940, the French banker and philanthropist had amassed a collection of more than 72,000 autochrome photographs. Grace Linden explores the Archives de la Planète — his sprawling, global project to document and preserve the fast-changing world — and uncovers a latent nostalgia in the hyperreal hues of early color photography.| The Public Domain Review
Proverbial scenes about human folly painted on serving plates.| The Public Domain Review
Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.| The Public Domain Review
With his enormous range of scholarly pursuits the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher has been hailed as the last Renaissance man and "the master of hundred arts". John Glassie looks at one of Kircher's great masterworks Mundus Subterraneus and how it was inspired by a subterranean adventure Kircher himself made into the bowl of Vesuvius.| The Public Domain Review
When geometrical solids took hold of the Renaissance imagination, they promised the quintessence of the third dimension in its pure and unadulterated form. Noam Andrews discovers how polyhedra descended from mathematical treatises to artists’ studios, distilling abstract ideas into objects one could see and touch.| The Public Domain Review
Angus Trumble on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company’s curious but longstanding fixation with the furry oddity that is the wombat — that “most beautiful of God’s creatures” which found its way into their poems, their art, and even, for a brief while, their homes.| The Public Domain Review
More than forty images of the ephemeral snowman, frozen eternally in the photograph.| The Public Domain Review
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.| The Public Domain Review
Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.| The Public Domain Review
A set of drawing workbooks embroiled in debates about the Indigenist aesthetic movement.| The Public Domain Review
The earliest full-length work of apiculture published in English, which popularised the discovery that bee colonies have queens instead of kings.| The Public Domain Review
Illustrations by a little-known Brazilian artist for the first French translation of H. G. Wells’ science-fiction classic.| The Public Domain Review
Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, curators of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, explore the wonderful history of made-up musical contraptions, including a piano comprised of yelping cats and Francis Bacon's 17th-century vision of experimental sound manipulation.| The Public Domain Review
Illuminations of European plants by an anonymous master.| The Public Domain Review