NEW ESSAY — “Men with Queer Nerves”: Ross Bullen on the odd phenomenon of “Jumping Frenchmen”, French-Canadian lumberjacks in 19th-c Maine who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out w/ their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak: publicdomainreview.org/essay…

Radical serving of Friday fish from the 1st colour publication on fish (1754). As the top specimen (with smiling sun) indicates, some of the offerings in the book lean perhaps a little too heavily on the imagination than today's ichthyologists may allow: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Studio photographs of #baseball players from @nypl’s @Spalding Collection. The photographs feature players of different teams from New York and Philadelphia and seem to be mostly taken in the 1870s and 1880s. Lots more here: publicdomainreview.org/colle… @mlb

Clear Shadows (1867) is a book of silhouette portraits (and riddles) by Ochiai Yoshiiku, depicting members of Edo's “kyōga-awase” club, who played a game similar to Pictionary — illustrating a subject but without drawing the subject itself. More here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

A few of the many great photos by Heinrich Hamann of Hamburg’s St. Pauli gymnastics society (Turnverein), circa 1900. More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, “Turnverein” gymnastics were meant to train a new form of body politic: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Illuminations by Evrard d'Espinque for a circa 1480 French translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' 13th-century De Proprietatibus Rerum. More marvellous maps from the manuscript here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Would he make your hot celeb liszt? Happy birthday to Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, and famed heartthrob Franz Liszt, born #onthisday in 1811. Leon Botstein explores what we can still learn from "possibly the greatest pianist that has ever lived” publicdomainreview.org/essay…

Edgar Allan Poe was big into code cracking. He once challenged readers of a Philadelphia paper to stump him with coded messages, deciphering dozens before having to “swear off” cryptograms forever. More on how code factors into his stories here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Experiment carried out according to the ideas of the French physiologist Charles Richet (1850–1935) who believed in thought transmission. One person makes a drawing, after which another person tries to copy it without seeing the originally drawn picture: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Colour plates from Edwin D. Babbitt’s Principles of Light and Color (1878). Babbit’s 600-page tome begins as a somewhat sober primer on color theory but goes on to explore the idea that our physical and psychic ills can be cured via “chromotherapy”: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Pages from a wonderful Italian book of proverbs made by the engraver and painter Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634–1718). More here: buff.ly/2uKnDmK

Diagram from Edward Livingston Youmans' Chemical Atlas; or, The Chemistry of Familiar Objects (1856). Buy as a print from our online shop here: publicdomainreview.org/produ…

Raven dives into a whale’s mouth and builds a fire; he travels to a town of ghosts, who rob him blind; he teaches a perpetual loser to be the Greatest Gambler in the World... Read the myths of the Tlingit people of southeastern Alaska: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

After complaints about Timothy Dexter's A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1797) being entirely devoid of punctuation, in future editions the eccentric businessman supplied a supplemental page so that people “may peper and solt as they please”: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Engraving of the three Cherokee Indians who visited London in 1762 to meet King George III. Read about this remarkable trip in the memoirs of the Anglo-American colonial officer Lieutenant Henry Timberlake, who travelled with them as their emissary: bit.ly/1OeLGKd

Frontispiece by Jay van Everen for American folklorist Parker Fillmore's The Laughing Prince: A Book of Yugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1921). Read the (loosely adapted) stories, and see more illustrations, on our website: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

The “Telephonoscope” — a device imagined in a Punch cartoon from 1879, predicting the advent of video chat more than 100 years before Skype or Zoom. See more here: bit.ly/1O1Kyff

Roger McDonald on the mysterious Dr Daniel Fenberger and his investigations into an archive known as “The Book of Halved Things” — from our Conjectures series: xitter.cf/PublicDomainRev/status…

Happy birthday and deathday to 17th-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682). See our Browne related content here, including essays by @HoooAW and Claire Preston: publicdomainreview.org/tags/… #OnThisDay #OTD

“American Maiden-hair Fern Fronds” — one of 15 Karl Blossfeldt prints available in our online shop: publicdomainreview.org/shop/… More about Blossfeldt in our post here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

#SundayReads: Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois: publicdomainreview.org/essay…