Notices by The Public Domain Review (publicdomainrev@mastodon.social)

155 years ago #onthisday, Top the wombat died. He was the pet of the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti who, upon Top's passing, created this self-portrait in mourning. More on Rossetti and co’s curious but longstanding fixation with the #wombat here: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/o-uommibatto-how-the-pre-raphaelites-became-obsessed-with-the-wombat/

Happy #JellyfishDay! The oceans are increasingly full of these gelatinous invertebrates, provoking a range of responses in humans, from disgust to awe. The biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel was most certainly in the latter camp... https://buff.ly/3q2G03j

Today Mexico celebrates the #DayOfTheDead. Skeletal imagery features heavily, influenced in no small part by the work of José Guadalupe Posada, known for his satirical and politically acute broadside prints called "calaveras" (skulls) — https://buff.ly/2tua8tS #diademuertos

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year” — Emily Dickinson.

(Essay on Dickinson's unusual manuscript forms, which included sweet wrappers and concert programmes, here: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-manuscripts-of-emily-dickinson/)

“November” from the Labours of the Months section of the Très Riches Heures, one of the most important illuminated manuscripts of the 15th century. A rather majestic farmer is shown presiding over his sounder of swine feeding from the autumn acorns: https://buff.ly/2Y0Nx2U

“There is Death in the Pot” — front cover for an early 19th-century book on culinary poisoning. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-treatise-on-adulteration-of-food-and-culinary-poisons-1820/

Happy All Hallows Eve! See our selection of Halloween postcards, ca. 1900-1920. Hobgoblins, joyous skeletons, and truly terrifying gourds... https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/halloween-postcards/ #halloween

Sabine Baring-Gould’s *Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition* (1865) is a landmark study collecting global tales relating to lycanthropes and other human-animal transformations: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-book-of-were-wolves/

Book from 1911 showing that taking photos of cats and furnishing them with an amusing caption is far from being a phenomenon born with the internet. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/kittens-and-cats-a-first-reader-1911-cats-and-captions-before-the-internet-age/ #NationalCatDay

Toe-licking demon, circa 1921.

One of many demonic entities found lurking in a Persian manuscript on magic and astrology from Isfahan, Iran. See our highlights here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/persian-demons-from-a-book-of-magic-and-astrology-1921/

Who ate all the pumpkins?

The Hajikkaki (はぢっかき).

More Japanese monsters from the Bakemono Zukushi scroll (18th–19th century) here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-bakemono-zukushi-monster-scroll-18th-19th-century/

Depiction of Bael, “the first king of hell”, with the head of a toad, a man, and a cat — one of the many illustrations by Louis le Breton for the 1863 edition of Jacques Collin de Plancy’s "Dictionnaire infernal". More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/defining-the-demonic/

Apologies for incomplete url , working link here! https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/compendium-of-demonology-and-magic-ca-1775/

Looking for some Halloween costume inspo? Some first-rate ideas in this 18th-century demonology book: publicdomainreview.org/collection/c...
#halloween

The Lebanese city of Tyre, as pictured in a circa 17th-century copy of Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Seafaring) by Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis (ca. 1465–1533).

More of his beautiful maps here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-maps-of-piri-reis/

Plate from M. E. Descourtilz’s Atlas des Champignons (1827), a delightful series of colour lithographs of mushrooms, divided into those that are edible, poisonous and “suspect” — https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/atlas-des-champignons/

The first charting of synaesthetic visualisations, plate 4 from Francis Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883). More on the site: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/synaesthesia-diagrams-1883

The Berlin of the 1920s is often associated with a certain excess and decadence, but it was a different side of the city — the “sobriety and desolation” of its industrial and working-class districts — which came to obsess the painter Gustav Wunderwald: https://publicdomainreview.org/2017/05/31/gustav-wunderwalds-paintings-of-weimar-berlin/

#tarot

Cards from Etteilla’s “Livre de Thot” Tarot, published around the time of the French Revolution.

More on this beautiful and beguiling creation here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/etteilla-thot