If you venture into the Collections section of The Public Domain Review, you will experience considered meditations on a broad range of subjects: from medieval pattern poems to the emotional lives of pigeons, from Albrecht Dürer’s pillows to various attempts to visualise and chart history. But if you venture far enough down the rabbit holes of our site, you will also encounter posts limited to just a few sentences, which do not always do full justice to the curious objects they describe.
These posts were, with little exception, written in the early days of PDR — the best efforts of an overworked sole editor trying to wear too many hats and overheating in the process. While these early posts serve as reminders for how much the site has evolved since those first forays, they can make for a jarring experience, pulling us away from a state of mind where ideas and images, from across our project’s history, are allowed to converse freely.
Since the project began in 2011, we’ve published more than a thousand Collections posts. Thanks to the growing support of our Friends, we have been able — in the last years — to further expand our team, welcoming a still-expanding group of Contributing Editors and a Managing Editor, Hunter Dukes. We are now in a position to revisit those Collections posts written in the project’s early days and give them the full attention they deserve. Sometimes this will simply mean updating an image gallery with higher-resolution photographs; other times, we will start from scratch, offering new angles, contexts, and stories to better understand a Collection. These “revisited” posts will be featured in a special section of our newsletter: PDR Revisited.
We want to thank our amazing readers and Friends for the incredible support that they continue to show The Public Domain Review. We hope you enjoy revisiting old favourites and discovering new wonders along the way.
To explore our growing number of PDR Revisited posts see this page.
