About
“… a gold mine of fantastic images and stories.”
The New York Times
“Magnificent … A model of digital curation.”
The Guardian
“Glorious … our blood brother in all things esoteric and historical.”
Lapham’s Quarterly
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
In particular, as our name suggests, the focus is on works which have now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. Our aim is to promote and celebrate the public domain in all its abundance and variety, and help our readers explore its rich terrain – like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond.
With a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of content which truly celebrates the breadth and diversity of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.
The vast majority of the content exists in our curated collections of images, books, audio and film, in which we shine a light on curiosities and wonders from a wide range of online archives. Some highlights include visions of the future from late 19th century France, a dictionary of Victorian slang and a film showing the very talented “hand-farting” farmer of Michigan.
Every two weeks we publish a new long-form essay in which leading scholars, writers, archivists, and artists offer insight and reflection upon the oft overlooked histories which surround public domain works – from a history of the smile in portraiture to the case of the woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits. Contributors include Julian Barnes, George Prochnik, Frank Delaney and Richard Hamblyn.
Series
In this series, edited by D. Graham Burnett, we offer up a home for experiments with historical form and method. The reader is asked to keep a live eye on these texts, which thread between past and present, between the imagination and the archive, between dreams and data. All may not be quite what it seems.
In this series, now come to an end, each month a curator from a gallery, library, archive, or museum picked out highlights from their openly licensed digital collections. Contributors included The British Library, The Getty, the Rijksmuseum, the US National Library of Medicine, and the UK National Archives.
The Newsletter
Every fortnight, accompanying the publication of our latest essay, we send out an email newsletter of all the most interesting content that we’ve recently featured.
PDR Press
This is our publishing spin-off project. Since 2014 it has published the annual Selected Essays series, which brings you the very best of our longform pieces in the form of lovingly-produced books; and as of early 2016, also New Editions, beautifully designed reprints and reworkings of public domain material.
The Shop
We’ve made some things to sell, returning a few select images from their pixel-based existence back into the world of real objects from whence they once came – Prints, T-shirts, Mugs and More.
Re-Using Material
As our name suggests all the historical works found on our site are in the public domain, at least somewhere in the world. Care should be taken as laws on re-use and what is in the public domain varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For more info on this, and on re-distributing the text of essays and posts, see the guide to re-using our material.
Open Knowledge International
Although now independent, for the first five years of its existence The Public Domain Review was a project of Open Knowledge International — an organisation dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms – and we worked closely alongside Open GLAM, a fellow OKI initiative, that promotes free and open access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.
