Observing the visible features of Martian landscapes, Giovanni Schiaparelli began seeing things almost immediately — shapes that resembled dim lines, crisscrossing the extraterrestrial desert. | Continue reading
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 center. | Continue reading
Some Japanese texts use a rebus-style script for teaching the illiterate to recite the *Heart Sūtra*, and other sacred texts, in Chinese. | Continue reading
Pages from a remarkable book, the result of a collaboration across many decades between a master scribe, the Croatian-born Georg Bocskay, and Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner's photographs of Abraham Lincoln. | Continue reading
In *The Letter H*, Alfred Leach passionately defends the aspirated aitch in words like "herb". | Continue reading
Far from the treacherous peaks and ravines of Switzerland, Alpine cottages arose, unexpectedly, amid the hillocks and modest streams of 19th-century England. Seán Williams recovers the peculiar fad for “Little Switzerlands”, where the Romantic sublime meets countryside kitsch. | Continue reading
What’s wondrous about browsing the images of snowball fights gathered here is how little changes across centuries and continents. | Continue reading
Thanks to the Music Modernization Act passed by US Congress in 2018, all sound recordings prior to 1923 will have their copyrights expire in the US on January 1st. | Continue reading
At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain. Find our highlights of what lies in store for 2022 here. | Continue reading
Alchemical images from a 17th- or 18th-century manuscript that claims to be much older: a direct translation from Zoroaster himself. | Continue reading
A cottage industry, yes, but a barbershop bank? Ross Bullen plots how a story told by William Wells Brown — novelist, historian, playwright, physician, and escaped slave — circulated, first through his own works, and then abroad, as a parable of American banking gone bad. | Continue reading
Arguably the very first images to depict space travel on a scientific basis, these wonderful illustrations are the work of the French illustrator Émile-Antoine Bayard. | Continue reading
Ten folktales, translated from Swahili by George W. Bateman, showcasing the rich tradition of storytelling in Zanzibar. | Continue reading
Hippolyte Baraduc’s book recounts his invention of a photography-like process in which his subjects directly transmitted their soul’s vibrations onto a chemical plate. | Continue reading
Mellan's pièce de résistance: an engraving of Christ incised with a single, spiralling line. | Continue reading
Political instability, popular unrest, and an impending pandemic? Welcome to France in the early 1830s. Vlad Solomon explores what made Parisiens laugh in a moment of crisis through the prism of a vaudeville play. | Continue reading
These designs capture a period of cultural change in Japan, when the kimono became increasingly associated with national mythmaking and tradition. | Continue reading
William Baillie-Grohman’s text on the art of hunting reproduces 243 illustrations and 400 years of arcane knowledge related to the pursuit of animals. | Continue reading
Can a person’s experiences on earth alter how they perceive the stars? Lauren Collee peers through the telescope of Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer whose politics informed his human approach to studying the cosmos. | Continue reading
Photogravures from one of the first series of X-rays ever produced, including, in addition to the skeletal forms of animals and human limbs, carved cameos and an assortment of various materials such as metal, wood, glass, and meat. | Continue reading
From the mythical Sandman, who participates in dream and vision, to an irritating grain lodged in the beachgoer’s eye, sand harbours unappreciated power, however mundane. Steven Connor celebrates this “most untrustworthy” type of matter. | Continue reading
Artful, detailed maps of the Mississippi’s meander belt created by US geologist and cartographer Harold Fisk. | Continue reading
A confession from the supposed man who caused a riot at the Haymarket Theatre in 1749, when he failed to shrink himself and crawl inside of a bottle. | Continue reading
A confession from the supposed man who caused a riot at the Haymarket Theatre in 1749, when he failed to shrink himself and crawl inside of a bottle. | Continue reading
John MacGregor’s four “views” of Mont Blanc, printed in color by George Baxter, reveal a different side of the mountain when compared to well-known Romantic depictions. | Continue reading
A 19th-century catalogue dedicated to showcasing diatoms (a type of unicellular microalgae) in all their intricate glory. | Continue reading
Millican's memoir of travels and exploits in the budding flower industry. | Continue reading
Long before Rauchenberg, Cage, or Malevich, Allais anticipated many of the innovations and experiments that would occupy 20th-century artists. | Continue reading
Among the “human curiosities” in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, a figure marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exoticised other. Betsy Golden Kellem investigates the complex of racial and cultural stereotypes that made … | Continue reading
These two images are from the book On the Writing of the Insane (1870) by G. Mackenzie Bacon, medical superintendant at an asylum (now Fulbourn Hospital) located near Cambridge, England. | Continue reading
To celebrate Dante's 700th anniversary, a look at how illustrators have tackled his most enduring work. | Continue reading
Why do helical seashells resemble spiralling galaxies and the human heart? Kevin Dann leads us into the gyre of James Bell Pettigrew’s Design in Nature (1908), a provocative and forgotten exploration of the world’s archetypal whorl. | Continue reading
What can visual art teach us about scent, stench, and the mysterious substance known as ambergris? Lizzie Marx follows a “whale-trail” across history to discover the olfactory paradoxes of the Dutch Golden Age. | Continue reading
These complex geometrical figures and perspective drawings are preserved in a little-known manuscript at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel | Continue reading
Of all the things described in William of Rubruck's account of his travels through 13th-century Asia, perhaps none is so striking as the remarkably ornate fountain he encountered in the Mongol capital which — complete with silver fruit and an angelic automaton — flowed with v … | Continue reading
How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts. | Continue reading
During the Enlightenment, when Diderot wrote his letter, blindness had become a topic of intense philosophical debate. | Continue reading
The illustrations from catalogues for Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks, published by C. T. Brock and Company, the oldest fireworks manufacturer in the United Kingdom. | Continue reading
From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll's Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art and literature. What might this say about past knowledge of hallucinogenic fungi? Mike Jay looks at early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species in particu … | Continue reading
In this early version of *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland*, we find illustrations drawn by the author Reverend Charles Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll. | Continue reading
The masks gathered here come from a report by Matilda Coxe Stevenson, one of the most dedicated ethnographers of Zuni at the turn of the 20th century. | Continue reading
In 1838, as the United States began its Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue. John Tresch guides us along this strange trip southward, following the pull of its unfathomable mysteries. | Continue reading
Observing the visible features of Martian landscapes, Giovanni Schiaparelli began seeing things almost immediately — shapes that resembled dim lines, crisscrossing the extraterrestrial desert. | Continue reading
Players moving pieces along a track to be first to reach a goal was the archetypal board game format of the 18th and 19th centuries. Alex Andriesse looks at one popular incarnation in which these pieces progress chronologically through history itself, usually with some not-so-sub … | Continue reading
Used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for millennia, it was only in the last decade of the 19th century that the powerful effects of mescaline began to be systematically explored by curious non-indigenous Americans and Europeans. Mike Jay looks at one such pioneer Havelo … | Continue reading