How the spirit of Brexit scuppered the dream of a Victorian chunnel. In 1851, a telegraph wire linked London and Paris directly. Might it be possible for a railway to follow? Many engineers believed it was: they proposed a tunnel, joining the roads and railways of Britain to th … | Continue reading
Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, … | Continue reading
French occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette refashioned the tarot deck as a tool for spiritual and mundane divination. | Continue reading
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 in … | Continue reading
Bound into three exquisitely colored volumes, *Fungi* features hundreds of species, collected across 42 years by a female mycologist named M. F. Lewis. | Continue reading
A chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour: from simple wheels to multi-layered pyramids, from scientific systems to those based on the hues of human emotion. | Continue reading
One of the earliest uses of intertitles, Hepworth’s film belongs to a genre of fin-de-siècle accident pictures, where we can observe cinema discovering new forms of communication. | Continue reading
Among the loveliest illuminations of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' encyclopedia, Evrard d'Espinque's illuminations use a T-O pattern to trace the Great Chain of Being. | Continue reading
More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn’s gymnastics were meant to train a new form of body politic. | Continue reading
With its otherworldly woodcuts and ornate descriptions of imagined architecture, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili brims with an obsessive and erotic fixation on form. Demetra Vogiatzaki accompanies the hero as he wanders the pages of this quattrocento marvel, at once a story of lost lov … | Continue reading
These two treatises detail the art of leaf preservation through “skeletonization”. | Continue reading
After a transformative moment on the Devon Coast, Vaughan Cornish devoted his life to the study of waveforms. | Continue reading
Collection of allegorical maps (17th–19th century) charting that heady territory of love, courtship, and marriage. | Continue reading
Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the history of visual art. | Continue reading
Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the history of visual art. | Continue reading
On September 15, 1885, twenty-five years after his capture in Sudan, Jumbo the elephant tragically died when struck by a freight train. Ross Bullen takes us on a spectral journey through other collisions between elephant and machine — in adventure novels, abandoned roadside hotel … | Continue reading
The future’s bombs, this training film produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge. | Continue reading
As historical documents, the surviving editions of *Harris’s List* offer today’s readers a rare glimpse into London's 18th-century sex trade. | Continue reading
As historical documents, the surviving editions of *Harris’s List* offer today’s readers a rare glimpse into London's 18th-century sex trade. | Continue reading
Hand-coloured plates of “the utmost fidelity” for William Hamilton's documentation of the late-eighteenth-century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. | Continue reading
Described by Kasimir Malevich as the “first step of pure creation in art”, his Black Square of 1915 has been cast as a total break from all that came before it. Yet searching across more than five hundred years of images related to mourning, humour, politics, and philosophy, Andr … | Continue reading
This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom. | Continue reading
A mixture of intimate journal entries, miscellaneous engravings, and sixteen chromolithographs — a unique, often surreal, retelling of life on the ice. | Continue reading
The ten-volume *Unai no tomo* is comprised of charming woodblock prints of traditional objects of play. | Continue reading
Over the course of a year, Thomas Carlyle supposedly transmitted this text to Dr. Wm. J. Bryan from beyond the grave. | Continue reading
Inkblot books were part bestiary, part parlor-game séance, cataloging those creatures that seemed to crawl out of the inkwell with the slightest encouragement. | Continue reading
Arika Okrent explores the rise and fall of Volapük - a universal language created in the late 19th century by a German priest called Johann Schleyer. | Continue reading
Idling alongside the waters of artificial grottoes, visitors found themselves in lush, otherworldly settings, where art and nature, pleasure and peril, and humans and nymphs could, for a time, coexist. Laura Tradii spelunks through the handmade caves of the Italian Renaissance an … | Continue reading
Pamphlet, printed in Philadelphia, describing strange sky phenomena witnessed over Riga and Kirschberg. | Continue reading
Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks … | Continue reading
Mary Gartside's *Essay* antedates James Sowerby’s and Goethe’s treatises on colour, while its illustrations have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting. | Continue reading
John Bevis' atlas was one of the greatest star charts produced during the Golden Age of the Celestial Atlas. | Continue reading
Learn about the deletion of a huge archive of book illustrations and sign an open letter to save it. | Continue reading
Visually dazzling set of hand-drawn charts created by Du Bois, condensing an enormous amount of data on African-American life into aesthetically daring and easily digestible visualisations. | Continue reading
A cryptic, Rosicrucian-inspired text of disputed authorship, featuring engravings rich in alchemical symbolism. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
These landscapes depict worlds populated by animals, where the built environment of humans is relegated to the distant background. | Continue reading
This 227-page volume collects, in wonderfully elaborate style, the signatures of over 75 of Europe’s most illustrious seventeenth-century nobles. | Continue reading
Inventor Robert Pittis Scott's *Cycling Art* offers a whimsical and illustrated tour through the previous century of “man-motor locomotion”. | Continue reading
Combing across 19th-century shores, seaweed collectors would wander for hours, tucking specimens into pouches and jars, before pasting their finds into artful albums. Sasha Archibald explores the eros contained in the pressed and illustrated pages of notable algologists, includin … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
Five-part mineralogical handbook containing more than four hundred vividly hand-colored engravings of various rocks, minerals, and compounds. | Continue reading
Completed in his early twenties, Dürer's pillow studies can seem to slip between the waking world and the stuff of dreams. | Continue reading
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 considers the relationship between … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
This turn-of-the-century guide to pigeon breeds marries the concerns of fanciers with the evolutionary theories of naturalists. | Continue reading
The oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot sequence, this mysterious deck contains a multitude of puzzles for both scholars and cartomancers. | Continue reading
For William James, “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity. | Continue reading