Collections – The Public Domain Review

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Alphonse Bertillon’s Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Traits (ca. 1909)

Cheat sheet to help police clerks put into practice Bertillon’s method for classifying and archiving the images of repeat offenders….more

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Hand-Drawn Infographics of African-American Life (1900)

Visually dazzling set of hand-drawn charts created by Du Bois, condensing an enormous amount of data on African-American life into aesthetically daring and easily d…more

The Splash of a Drop (1895)

A delightfully focused study on the physics and aesthetics of a splashing drop, wit some wonderful diagrams….more

The Steps of Life

Selection of images illustrating on the idea that one’s life can be thought of as divisible into distinct stages….more

B. W. Betts’ Geometrical Psychology

Diagrams from Geometrical psychology, or, The science of representation: an abstract of the theories and diagrams of B. W. Betts (1887) by Louisa S. Cook, which det…more

The majority of the digital copies featured are in the public domain or under an open license all over the world, however, some works may not be so in all jurisdictions. On each Collections post we’ve done our best to indicate which rights we think apply, so please do check and look into more detail where necessary, before reusing. All articles published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Strong Freedom in the Zone.

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19th Century