The Public Domain Review

Check out the Public Domain Review [0]. They have an excellent collection of free and public domain resources as well as a print shop with loads of really interesting art. Also, as a shameless plug, I sell high-quality giclee prints of a small but growing amount of public domain art on Etsy [1]. [0] https://publicdomainreview.org [1] https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TheDoveAndTheSeagull

> The very fact people think they need to read (fiction) books released this year more than ones released before is baffling. Do they really? I was comparing rates of production vs consumption. It doesn't follow that what is being consumed on a given year is this year's production. My guess is that most of the books written are read by hardly anyone. A few authors have a faithful following that will read their books as soon as it's out (which isn't too baffling). Reviewers and critics may indeed be more likely to review new books, which might impact people's decisions (again, not necessarily baffling). Book shops also put new books forward, but all those books tend to be the ones by trendy authors. Other than the few fashionable books that come out each year you'll find reviewers like the one described in the article who don't seem to focus on new books (e.g. they talk about Dostoïevski), so it is not obvious that people feel that compelled to read new books. > the backlog of books spread across millennia, not a century. How much I agree with this! Plus, time does such a great job at filtering out the good from the bad (or the exceptional from the mundane). That's where lists of books entering the public domain, like this one [0], are important. Or the reviews [1]. Ultimately, the fact that there is more available to read than is possible even to the most voracious of readers means that most people will rely on guidance on what to read. [0]…

I suggest looking at the https://publicdomainreview.org/ for a more comprehensive listings, and this one for books: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026

To be clear: the actual scans are fine, what is removed was the ability to browse and search for these images on Flickr, with metadata & tags added by users, rather then having to manually download thousands of photos on IA, without any web-based search or preview. The linked article goes into this: https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2022/04/5-million-book-illustratio… But for all the greatness of Internet Archive (and it is truly great!) it doesn’t have the user-interface for images that Flickr has, the ability to save to galleries, add tags, and effectively search. That’s why it was such a marriage made in heaven. As far as we are aware, with the IA Book Images account gone, there is now no way to search for individual images from the hundreds of thousands of books at Internet Archive

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? by Frederick Douglass https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/frederick-douglass-fourth-ju… "Upon finishing his speech to the six hundred or so mostly white abolitionists, Douglas was met with “a universal burst of applause” and seven hundred copies of the above-featured pamphlet were subscribed to on the spot."

I'm not sure about that but you can see and hear him give the introduction to the bizarre (and almost certainly not true) Soviet film "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms" (1940). Haldane was a great scientist, but his judgement may have been blurred here due to his (then) support of the Soviet Union https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/experiments-in-the-revival-o…

"The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions." https://publicdomainreview.org

The Newgate Calendar is another great resource for this type of early records of crime and 'justice': https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/the-newgate-calendar/

There is the Public Domain Review[1] "dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas" that have fallen into the public domain. Think about Shakespeare's works for a good example of something in the public domain. Anyone can use Romeo & Juliet's characters any way they like. Similarly, there is a huge amount of derivative work of Price and Prejudice[2] [1] https://publicdomainreview.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_adaptations_of_Pride_an…

Related website: http://publicdomainreview.org/ review works that are entering the public domain since 2011. There are some pretty interesting stuff. Disclaimer: I work for the Open Knowledge International, which used to fund the Public Domain Review.

I'd add https://publicdomainreview.org/ which I've found to have a large variety of topics covered. I could also spend ages looking through http://www.textfiles.com. Lastly, https://monoskop.org/Monoskop, "a wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities."

They link through to the book itself, I am crying with laughter. http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884… One of my favourites: under 'games' is listed 'carousal', word that I hope to use daily from now on.

Love this! "In general, we encourage contributions which highlight material at the more unorthodox end of the cultural spectrum – curiosities, obscure theories, strange inventions, and so on. If on a well-known figure then we tend to favour an unusual angle or a focus on lesser known works. As well as pieces which focus on particular works, we also welcome articles with a broader historical focus, though they should be closely aligned with interesting material to which we can link." They even have a book of selected essays available! https://publicdomainreview.org/essay-book/

Agreed! I loved his piece on Humphry Davy's early experiments with laughing gas for the Public Domain Review: http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/08/06/o-excellent-air-bag-humphry-d…

The Public Domain Review (http://publicdomainreview.org/) is probably perfect for you. Covers a wide range of archive.org and Gutenberg books and it's well tagged so you can focus on particular interests.

Tangent- Poking around this site brought me to a page listing ways to help out in digitizing records of the past. Going through that led me to a site that's transcribing old revolutionary war era war department documents, which I promptly signed up to do. I love poring over those kinds of records and I'm really excited to find a way to be useful while I'm doing it. There's all kinds of volunteer transcription projects going on- http://publicdomainreview.org/building-the-digital-cultural-commons/

>It turns out that, aside from their common interest in antagonising Isaac Newton, Hooke and Leibniz also shared an interest in mechanising scientific reasoning through the invention of a universal language for science. Leibniz called his project the "Characteristica Universalis". I'm surprised it doesn't mention Leibniz's famous "Let us calculate" quote: >>In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote: >>>The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.[1] I'm also kind of surprised that Hooke wrote the letter in English, since I assumed all academic communication across language barriers back then would have been in Latin. But ChatGPT tells me Leibniz was unusually multi-lingual. [1] Sorry, ad-heavy site but I wanted one that gave context: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-an…

I'm not the person you asked but I try to keep my gems in bookmarks, would love to share some. Obviously I don't know your interests so take it for what you will. I have many more than I'll post here if you want some. Some of this came from HN, some from elsewhere. This website lists the first references to some cultural icons on Usenet (for example the first time AIDS was ever discussed, first mention of a new TV cartoon "The Simpsons", etc.) http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html The Public Domain Review, a collection and analysis of interesting stuff in the public domain https://publicdomainreview.org/ David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. I have spent many hours browsing the incredible content here. https://www.davidrumsey.com/ Artvee. Free, high quality art. https://artvee.com/ Restoration Mustang. A high quality long term journal of the restoration of a classic Mustang. Think like an /r/diy project but with way more detail and over a longer time scale. https://restorationmustang.com/ The Renegade Gardener. Highly opinionated no-bullshit gardening advice. I especially love the "Don't Do That" section. https://renegadegardener.com/ Garden Myths. There's a lot of misinformation and old wives' tales in gardening, this website cuts the crap. https://www.gardenmyths.com/ Million Short is a search engine that lets you cut out the million (or 10,000 or 100,000) top results from a search, really good for finding gems. It also has an option for…

Two suggestions to add to the many excellent ones already here: Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education [0] is a wonderful, wonderful book in the public domain – recently submitted here but didn't get much attention. It is well worth spending a lot of time studying its exercises and examples. [0] https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dow-composition/ My second suggestion is more general but it worked wonders for me. I had a teacher years ago whose take-home assignments consisted of extremely rudimentary drawing exercises, starting with drawing a series of straight lines in parallel across a page, then moving on to squares, circles etc but always basic geometric shapes. His point was that drawing is, at its most basic level, a physical skill like many others which require physical and neurological adaptations that can only be improved with practice. In addition to the creating these lines and shapes, one was obliged to pay strict attention to their relation to other marks on the page – your circles could not overlap, for example, and your straight lines must run parallel and start and end at the same page border. The lines had to start and end very definitely at the correct point. He was also keen to examine and correct each student's physical stance in relation to the easel, the light, and the subject, and insisted we draw from the shoulder, not the elbow or wrist, as much as possible. The goal was to train…

The Public Domain Review: https://publicdomainreview.org/

Its interesting to contrast the two approaches taken by london and paris. Barring the great fire (and I suspect there will have been similar events in paris as well) There was no one architect or style that completely flattened the victorian london. The strand, which is now a large paris style boulevard was a semi-slum/porn publishing district. Around the houses or parliament was a spectacularly large slum. https://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/29/the-secret-history-of-holywe… (warning Victorian porn. NSFW) This did mean that in the 1920-40s there was a massive expansion into the "suburbs" to escape the slums, poverty and diseases of central london. This is a decline that has only really just reversed in the last 20 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London) The crucial thing was that "social" housing was placed in every borough of the city, not just on the outskirts. The highest density of social housing is in southwark, which is opposite both the houses of parliament and the "city". I imagine its the equivalent of building ~80k houses exclusively for the poor in the 6th and 7th arrondissement

I'm sorry, but that sounds like something that Athanasius Kircher[1] (who created a fascinating but completely off-the-wall translation system for Egyptian hieroglyphics[2]) would say. As far as I know, Chinese writing likely followed the same path as Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphs (both of which, IIRC, have well-attested archaeological evidence): originating as markings for inventory-like purposes (a drawing of two penguins => this shipment contains two penguins) and then expanding into recording spoken language. There is a complicating factor, AFAIK, in that the earliest known form of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script used to write on bones for divination purposes, already has clear meaning as words and is possibly traceable through to modern characters.[3][4] On the other hand, as well, "had only very vague meanings" seems to be the initial take on every untranslated writing system: Chinese, hieroglyphics, Mayan, Minoan/Mycenaean, etc. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommed Umberto Eco's book, The Search for the Perfect Language. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_Kircher#Egyptology [2] https://publicdomainreview.org/2013/05/16/athanasius-kircher-and-the-h… [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#History [4] http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html Edit: I just got to digging around and remembered that the cover of John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy has the same phrase in…

The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong. They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the limitations of their imagination aren't able to predict other entirely new revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting with the new tech. So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device. In other examples I've seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming machinery but he's using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there's the frequent use cast iron to build some of this "future tech" when of course, not much is made from cast iron these days. It makes me wonder what things we literally can't imagine about the future now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to produce entirely new things. [1] http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year-2000-1899…

Checking out the French ideas from 1899-1910 on what 2000 would be like : http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-… "The New-Fangled barber" isn't quite there yet, but we do have electric razors and trimmers. Then again, the electric trimmer is fairly old at this point. "An Arial battle" and "Torpedo planes" bombers, ground attack aircraft and fighters. I'm not surprised the first use ideas for aircraft are in war. We have "Aviation police" of sorts, except they're a combination of air traffic controllers and the FAA. And the near-collisions in "Aero-Cab station" are eerily similar to what has already happened. We also have air-mail, but "Rural Postman" with his own flying machine hasn't quite happened yet. We don't have "intensive breeding" machines per-se, but the poultry industry is pretty automated these days. We have drones today except they don't have a guy with a looking glass. We have "electric floor cleaners" that don't involve a maid. Am I the only one shocked that the maid uniform has essentially stayed exactly the same (maybe with shorter skirts). I mean, look at military uniforms. The helmets in particular have changed a great deal. Same with police uniforms. The "well trained orchestra" is basically a synthesizer. "House rolling through the countryside" is real today and we call them Dollies (http://hmrsupplies.com) "At school" knowledge download is not quite what we have, but Wikipedia and Google come close. After…

> Stoker, a theatre manager with no medical background, somehow described the basic mechanism of heterochronic parabiosis Just to pick a nit... Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood. Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-and-the-bi…

This is a nice alternative link because it zooms into a few areas https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/an-anciente-mappe-of-fairyla…

Brings to mind the Errol Morris investigation of a pair of historic photos in which the photographer may or may not have altered the scene to amp up the drama. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/roger-fenton-valley-of-the-s…

was looking for a good speed reader after seeing this public domain post, https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2026/01/public-domain-day-2026/ , and wanting to read Vile Bodies. Then took a few minutes to throw this together

I guess it is meant to be a bit of fun, creating a sense of a countdown to the "big day". A few people might go back and check each day, but I suppose most will just catch a few days on social media (they do a post every day saying saying what the new window reveal is), or just check back on January 1st, which is public domain day, and when all windows will have been revealed. They do a blogpost on that day too which unrolls the whole selection of highlights. E.g. see this one from PD day of this year: https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2024/01/public-domain-day-2024/. That's maybe seen as the main thing.