Ha Bun Shu: a Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs (1919)
Wonderful selection of wave and ripple designs produced by the Japanese artist Mori Yuzan, which would have found their way onto swords and associated paraphernalia, …Continued
20th Century
Alexander Graham Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites (1903–9)
The wonderful imagery documenting Alexander Graham Bell's experiments with tetrahedral kites. …Continued
Photographs of Sea Stars (1917)
Strangely alluring images from a report by German zoologist Ludwig Heinrich Philipp Döderlein on starfish collected during the Siboga Expedition around Indonesia. …Continued
Growing Things: A Film Lesson in “Nature Study” (1928)
Gardening lessons from the late 1920s, centreing on the cultivation of beans, including some wonderful time-lapse footage and inter-titles to match. …Continued
The War Art of Paul Nash (1917–1944)
Depictions of the destroyed and broken landscapes of the First and Second World War by the English artist Paul Nash, amongst the most important landscape …Continued
Texts in Mathias Enard’s Compass
Collection of the major public domain texts featuring in the novel Compass by French writer Mathias Enard — including Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Joseph-Charles Mardrus. …Continued
Scenes from Rip Van Winkle (1903)
Recording made for Colombia Records in which the legendary actor Joseph Jefferson plays the part of Rip Van Winkle. …Continued
Edward Curtis’ Photographs of Kwakwaka’wakw Ceremonial Dress and Masks (ca. 1914)
The ceremonial costumes and masks of the Kwakwaka'wakw people as photographed by American photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis, famous for his work with Native American …Continued
John McCormack – Recordings: 1911-1940
The songs of one of Ireland's best known tenors, renowned for lending his superior diction and breath control to a whole range of operatic and …Continued
Maniac Chase (1904)
One of the very first screen depictions of the now familiar Napoleon delusion trope — in which a mentally ill person believes themselves to be …Continued
The Strange Adventures of a Pebble (1921)
The natural history of the world from the point of view of a personified pebble. …Continued
Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century
Peddling lies in public goes back to antiquity, but it is the with the Tabloid Wars of the 19th-century when it first reached the widespread …Continued