James Sowerby's *British Mineralogy* (1802–1817)

Five-part mineralogical handbook containing more than four hundred vividly hand-colored engravings of various rocks, minerals, and compounds.

Bruegel the Elder’s *Big Fish Eat Little Fish* (1556)

Bruegel's drawing, based on a proverb and subject to numerous adaptations, relates the natural world to injustice: the feeling that human predation is innately born and instinctive.

“Pajamas from Spirit Land”: Searching for William James

After the passing of William James — philosopher, early psychologist, and investigator of psychic phenomena — mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor. Channelling these fragmentary voices, Alicia Puglionesi...

Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies (1493)

Completed in his early twenties, Dürer's pillow studies can seem to slip between the waking world and the stuff of dreams.

Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: *Composition* (1905 edition)

Arthur Wesley Dow's influential arts education handbook fused Japanese *ukiyo-e* with the author's unique minimalism, which he derived from the landscapes of New England.

Unnatural Selection: Emil Schachtzabel’s Pigeon *Prachtwerk* (1906)

This turn-of-the-century guide to pigeon breeds marries the concerns of fanciers with the evolutionary theories of naturalists.

A Paper Archaeology: Piranesi’s Ruinous Fantasias

From the vast confines of his imaginary prisons to the billowy scenes that comprise his grotteschi, the early works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi wed the exacting details of first-hand observation with the farthest reaches of artistic imagination....

Judith Sargent Murray’s *On the Equality of the Sexes* (1790)

Against the backdrop of the American Revolution, Judith Sargent Murray’s essay made what was, at the time, a radical claim: women are the intellectual equals of men.

A Renaissance Riddle: The Sola Busca Tarot Deck (1491)

The oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot sequence, this mysterious deck contains a multitude of puzzles for both scholars and cartomancers.

Portrait of a Scaphander

Brad Fox tells a history-story that follows the fuzzy logics we associate with a “shaggy dog”. An aquatic dog? Maybe. The sea bends everything — even light.

William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890)

For William James, “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity.

The Kept and the Killed

Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its...

Hieroglyphics of a Rope-Dancer: *The Book of Fate* (1822)

An oracular hoax by William Henry Ireland, *aka* Herman Kirchenhoffer, that profited from the 19th-century mania for Egyptology and Napoleonic relics.

The Holkham Bible Picture Book (ca. 1330)

This "Bible" selectively illustrates the Old and New Testaments, taking us from Genesis to Revelation in a series of 231 beautifully executed miniatures.

Resurrection on Repeat: *Rules and Orders of the Humane Society* (1787)

The pamphlet documents thirteen years of success since the 1774 establishment of Britain’s Humane Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead by Drowning.

Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword

Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove...

Between Frogs and Gods: Illustrations of Physiognomy

Images of a frog metamorphing into Apollo illustrating Johann Kaspar Lavater's theories of physiognomy.

Gustave Zander and the 19th-Century Gym

Contemporary fitness culture finds its origins in 19th-century Stockholm, where Dr. Zander invented precursors to our contemporary gym equipment.

Happy Public Domain Day 2022!

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.

Top 10 Most Read Pieces from 2021

From Alice's Wonderland to Japanese fireworks, a rundown of the ten most read pieces we published this year.