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Pompous know-it-alls were once a mainstay of mockery on the Italian stage. Arnoud Visser investigates this stock character of the pedant and his association with individual superiority, social distinction, and sexual transgression, finding a form of satire that took aim at the Renaissance humanist’s erudition and lofty ideals.
Cover designs for José Carlos Mariátegui’s radical Lima-based magazine.
Selections from a peculiar British journal that focus on the peculiarities of British monarchs.
Diagrams from a lost Urdu manuscript illustrating the propitious days and directions for travel.
Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting. Richard Fallon explores this “lost world” novel, finding a work as interested in cutting-edge science as it was in paying dues to its generic precursors.
69 images of kite flying from across 5 centuries and some 10 countries.
Paintings from an era when Venetians brawled on bridges.
A philosophical system and a practical guide for the cultivation of dramatic genius.
Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Soil.
Legal infographics that reflect a Turkish nation in flux.
In the Middle Ages, rumours spread across Europe of a strange hybrid creature, half-animal, half-plant, known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. A hoax based on fern rhizomes? A euphemism for culled fetal lambs? Or perhaps a medieval misapprehension of cotton? Thom Sliwowski traces the roots of this fabled zoophyte.
Photographs of flowers by an advocate of California’s beauty.
Historical predictions from the Scottish Nostradamus.
Photographs and films of a forgotten pastime.
Before Linotype revolutionised typesetting in the 1880s, compositors set texts by hand — and they set them fast. Alex Wright rediscovers the thrilling world of typesetting races, which drew crowds in the thousands, offered huge cash prizes, and helped women "Swifts" fight for workplace equity.
A Dutch physician’s encounter with acupuncture.
A treatise on a powder that can cure wounds at a distance.
The working class undergirds everything in this cartoon of capitalist society.
What allowed occultism to blossom in the United States at the turn of the 20th century? Linotype machines, cheap pulp paper, and newly improved postal networks. Allan Johnson investigates the forgotten history and (still living) world of mail-order magic.
Lantern slide of man battling bug.
An early contribution to drug literature, in which a man came to be fashioned out of wood.
Announcing an exciting new book series!
A modernist adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe. One of the first avant-garde films from America.
The creator of WNYC's Public Song Project on creativity, copyright, and the public domain.
As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead. Roger Luckhurst exhumes the history of this period, when anatomists fuelled a body-snatching trade led by “resurrection men” and reformers sought alternatives to the toxic urban graveyards and their pestilent fumes.
