A literary magazine whose criterion for acceptance was simple: each piece had to have been previously rejected ..read more

Richard Owen, the Victorian scientist who first named the “dinosaurs”, claimed that he could identify an animal, even an extinct one, from inspecting a single bone. Richard Fallon revisits other Owen-inspired fictions — by R. D. Blackmore, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley — and finds literature layered with scientific, religious, and political interventions, spurred by the discovery of prehistoric life ..read more

A treatise on the challenges facing workers — and potential solutions — that advocates socialism at the turn of the 20th century ..read more

Stereographs depicting daily life in Palestine before the British Mandate ..read more

Aquatint engravings that were employed to reproduce the tonal subtleties of drawings ..read more

In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth ..read more

A chemistry treatise that weds the hard sciences with theosophical insight, making a microscope of the psychic mind ..read more

From the mid-sixteenth century, broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events circulated widely across the Holy Roman Empire against the backdrop of Reformation ..read more

A fantasia of travellers and archipelago dwellers, illustrated in a chimerical fashion by the author ..read more

Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy ..read more