Illustrations of supposed physiognomic affinities between humans and animals.
By manipulating paper flaps, the child could turn Adam into Eve into a mermaid, a lion into a griffin into an eagle — all while learning about the inevitability of death.
Vibrant textiles from the dazzling Timurid metropolis of Bukhara.
Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users.
Photographs from when Atlantic City beaches featured artists ornately sculpting sand.
A Zoroastrian text about serpents translated by the President of the Bombay Anthropological Society.
Circular maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness.
Pompous know-it-alls were once a mainstay of mockery on the Italian stage. Arnoud Visser investigates this stock character of the pedant and his association with individual superiority, social distinction, and sexual transgression, finding a form of satire that took aim at the Renaissance humanist's erudition and lofty ideals.
Cover designs for José Carlos Mariátegui's radical Lima-based magazine.
Selections from the long-running British journal on historical peculiarities, from the whereabouts of Mary Queen of Scot's severed head to the identity of Charles I's hooded executioner.
Diagrams from a now-lost Urdu manuscript illustrating the propitious days and directions for travel.
Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap's The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting. Richard Fallon explores this "lost world" novel, finding a work as interested in cutting-edge science as it was in paying dues to its generic precursors.
69 images of kite flying from across 5 centuries and some dozen countries.
Artworks from an era when Venetians brawled on bridges.
A philosophical system and a practical guide for the cultivation of dramatic genius.
Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Soil.
Legal infographics that reflect a Turkish nation in flux.
In the Middle Ages, rumours spread across Europe of a strange hybrid creature, half-animal, half-plant, known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. A hoax based on fern rhizomes? A euphemism for culled fetal lambs? Or perhaps a medieval misapprehension of cotton? Thom Sliwowski traces the roots of this fabled zoophyte.
Photographs of flowers by an advocate of California's beauty.
Historical predictions from the Scottish Nostradamus.
Photographs and films of a forgotten pastime.
Before Linotype revolutionised typesetting in the 1880s, compositors set texts by hand — and they set them fast. Alex Wright rediscovers the thrilling world of typesetting races, which drew crowds in the thousands, offered huge cash prizes, and helped women "Swifts" fight for workplace equity.
A Dutch physician's encounter with acupuncture.
A treatise on a powder that can cure wounds at a distance.
The working class undergirds everything in this cartoon of capitalist society.
What allowed occultism to blossom in the United States at the turn of the 20th century? Linotype machines, cheap pulp paper, and newly improved postal networks. Allan Johnson investigates the forgotten history and (still living) world of mail-order magic.
Lantern slide of man battling bug.
An early contribution to drug literature, in which a man came to be fashioned out of wood.
Announcing an exciting new book series!
A modernist adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe. One of the first avant-garde films from America.
The creator of WNYC's Public Song Project on creativity, copyright, and the public domain.
As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead. Roger Luckhurst exhumes the history of this period, when anatomists fuelled a body-snatching trade led by "resurrection men" and reformers sought alternatives to the toxic urban graveyards and their pestilent fumes.
Marvels, wonders, and monstrosities: something between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects.
One of the most elaborate works of literary insult ever written.
Moneymaking caricatures by a teenage Monet, before he turned to Impressionism.
In early modern Europe, around the time when lenses began to bring the world (and heavens) into newfound focus, patients started appearing in medical records with a particular ailment: a firm belief that they were made of glass. Tamara Sanderson investigates the source and manifestation of this delusion, and finds a psychological idiom that once carried the weight of what could otherwise not be said.
"Tall-tale" or "exaggeration" postcards illustrating the bounties of California.
A utopian novel where men are no longer necessary.
Illustrations of Javanese wayang kulit puppets with vivid colour and gilding.
Does the flâneur, that curiously modern figure who wanders metropolitan streets, have a political consciousness? For Franz Hessel — author of Spazieren in Berlin, "a memorization while strolling" that Walter Benjamin called "thoroughly epic" — the answer seemed to be no. Paul Sullivan explores Hessel's perambulations through Berlin and the achievements and limitations of his vision.
Unruly steeds from King Mu's mythology, cavorting across a silk scroll.
A bestselling 18th-century cookbook, containing the first recipe for curry in English.
A wondrous illuminated manuscript, which gathers and illustrates the marvels of the world and beyond.
Observations of "snow flowers" made by microscope in Edo-era Japan.
Taking dictation, revising manuscripts, typing copies, literary amanuenses often labour for little compensation and even less recognition. Christine Jacobson explores the neglected efforts of women like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot, who — through their work as typists, editors, and champions — had a profound impact on modern literature.
A forgotten bridge between Spiritualism and UFO encounters.
A WWII propaganda film narrated as an "auto"-biography
Before the attention economy consumed our lives, "pursuit tests" devised by the US military coupled man to machine with the aim of assessing focus under pressure. D. Graham Burnett explores these devices for evaluating aviators, finding a pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings.
Etchings of birds in a somewhat theatrical style.
Slides from twenty years of lecturing about the workings of the universe and the fate of the soul.
