A bone-chilling book of woodblock prints, depicting a parade of demons, by Kawanabe Kyōsai, the bad boy of 19th-century Japanese art. | Continue reading
Historical photographs of early Juneteenth celebrations throughout its home state of Texas and across the country. | Continue reading
Weighing in at a colossal 18,000 lines, Herman Melville's Clarel (1876), which centres on the theological musings of a group of pilgrims touring the Holy Land, is not for the faint-hearted. Jeff Wheelwright explores the knot of spiritual dilemmas played out in the poem and it … | 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
Although largely forgotten today, exercise by club swinging was all the rage in the 19th century. Daniel Elkind explores the rise of the phenomenon in the US, and how such efforts to keep trim and build muscle were inextricably entwined with the history of colonialism, immigratio … | Continue reading
We made you a colouring book to help you through these strange times, featuring works by Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, Virginia Frances Sterrett, and Aubrey Beardsley. | Continue reading
Startling Baroque paintings of imaginary ruins and other fantastic architecture by a proto-surrealist master. | Continue reading
List of Latin words used to veil words deemed too scandalous in Bernard S. Talmey’s treatise on carnal acts. | Continue reading
The California Gold Rush transformed the landscape and population of the United States. It also introduced a new figure into American life and the American imagination — the effete Eastern urbanite who travels to the Wild West in quest of his fortune. Alex Andriesse examines how … | Continue reading
Two PSA films featuring the multi-talented director, actor, doctor, and hypochondriac Richard Massingham. | Continue reading
In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machi … | Continue reading
Dorothy Parker’s reputation as one of the premier wits of the 20th century rests firmly on the brilliance of her writing, but the image of her as a plucky, fast-talking, independent woman of her times owes more than a little to her seat at the legendary Algonquin Round Table. Jon … | Continue reading
A selection of D. A. Rovinskiĭ’s collection of lubki — colorful Russian prints from the 16th through 20th century. | Continue reading
In the 21st-century, infographics are everywhere. In the classroom, in the newspaper, in government reports, these concise visual representations of complicated information have changed the way we imagine our world. Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (178 … | Continue reading
One remarkable symptom of scurvy, that constant bane of the Age of Discovery, was the acute and morbid heightening of the senses. Jonathan Lamb explores how this unusual effect of sailing into uncharted territory echoed a different kind of voyage, one undertaken by the Empiricist … | Continue reading
John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been many things to many people — a Christian epic, a comment on the English Civil War, the epitome of poetic ambiguity — but it is first of all a pleasure to read. Drawing on sources as varied as Wordsworth, Hitchcock, and Conan Doyle, author Phil … | Continue reading
Of the various forms the nascent art of sound recording took in the late nineteenth century perhaps none was so aesthetically alluring as that invented by Margaret Watts-Hughes. Rob Mullender-Ross explores the significance of the Welsh singer’s ingenious set of images, which unti … | Continue reading
Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. | Continue reading
With her serpentine dance — a show of swirling silk and rainbow lights — Loie Fuller became one of the most celebrated dancers of the fin de siècle. | Continue reading
A series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the … | Continue reading
Watercolours from an early twentieth-century book of spells depicting Persian demons associated with the zodiac. | Continue reading
The first paper to link carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and earth heating. | Continue reading
While nowadays he might be best known for the cut of meat that bears his name, François-René de Chateaubriand was once one of the most famous men in France — a giant of the literary scene and idolised by such future greats as Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo. Alex Andriesse … | Continue reading
The philosopher's method for creating a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. | Continue reading
Although often overshadowed by the escapades of her more famous husband (said by some to be the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones), the photographs taken by Yvette Borup Andrews on their first expeditions through Central Asia stand today as a compelling contribution to earl … | Continue reading
When the existence of unicorns, and the curative powers of the horns ascribed to them, began to be questioned, one Danish physician pushed back through curious means — by reframing the unicorn as an aquatic creature of the northern seas. Natalie Lawrence on a fascinating converge … | Continue reading
From gift-bestowing sparrows and peach-born heroes to goblin spiders and dancing phantom cats — in a series of beautifully illustrated books, the majority printed on an unusual cloth-like crepe paper, the publisher Takejiro Hasegawa introduced Japanese folk tales to the West. Chr … | Continue reading
Bennett Gilbert peruses a sketchbook of 15th-century engineer Johannes de Fontana, a catalogue of designs for a wide-range of fantastic and often impossible inventions, including fire-breathing automatons, pulley-powered angels, and the earliest surviving drawing of a magic lante … | Continue reading
Poe’s story of a treasure hunt, revealing the fantastical writer’s hyper-rational penchant for cracking codes. | Continue reading
Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs — Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life. | Continue reading
Musings upon the whys and wherefores of polar bears, particularly in relation to their forest-dwelling cousins, played an important but often overlooked role in the development of evolutionary theory. Michael Engelhard explores. | 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
Roger McDonald on the mysterious Dr Daniel Fenberger and his investigations into an archive known as “The Book of Halved Things'. | Continue reading
In 1915 Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the worldwide Scouts movement, published his DIY guide to espionage, My Adventures as a Spy. Mark Kaufman explores how the book's ideas to utilise such natural objects as butterflies, moths and leaves, worked to mythologize British resource … | 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. Today when someone points a camera at us, we smile. Thi … | Continue reading
Though the 17th-century whaling station of Smeerenburg was in reality, at its height, just a few dwellings and structures for processing blubber, over the decades and centuries a more extravagant picture took hold — that there once had stood, defying its far-flung Arctic location … | Continue reading
Illustrations from the 19th-century physics text books of Amédée Guillemin. | Continue reading
Book of Insects: An Alphabet of Floral Emblems (London; New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1857) In the first chapter of his Book of Insects, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915) introduces the reader to his workshop — which is to say his home — located on a pebbly expanse of land near the Pr … | Continue reading
Walt Whitman’s influence on the creative output of 20th-century Russia — particularly in the years surrounding the 1917 Revolution — was enormous. For the 200th anniversary of Whitman's birth, Nina Murray looks at the translators through which Russians experienced his work, not o … | Continue reading
In addition to the numerous pioneering works of science fiction by which he made his name, H. G. Wells also published a steady stream of non-fiction meditations, mainly focused on themes salient to his stories: the effects of technology, human folly, and the idea of progress. As … | Continue reading
Illustrations of a mysterious and terrifying animal that terrorised a small region of France in the 1760s. | Continue reading
Jé Wilson charts the migration of the Lustucru figure through the French cultural imagination — from misogynistic blacksmith bent on curbing female empowerment, to child-stealing bogeyman, to jolly purveyor of packaged pasta. | Continue reading
How alphabet books dealt with the letter X before the rise of x-rays and xylophones. | Continue reading
Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the … | Continue reading
Hot on the heels of the French revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman ex … | Continue reading
In the early 1730s, a mysterious editor (known only as “Hurlothrumbo”) committed to print a remarkable anthology: transcriptions of the graffiti from England’s public latrines. For all its misogynistic and scatological tendencies, this little-known book of “latrinalia” offers a u … | Continue reading