Written by an exterminator, this treatise wanders into a surprising mode: one inflected not by disgust, but rather coy wonder and begrudging awe.
Thirty albumen silver prints of designs created through ornamental lathework.
These caricatures of well-known Philadelphians transpose human heads onto animal forms.
For almost 250 years, a mysterious pleasure park sat on the banks of Amsterdam's canals. Angela Vanhaelen leads us on a tour of the bawdy fountains, disorienting maze, and mechanical androids in the Oude Doolhof β an attraction that mingled pagan, protestant, and imperial desires.
In this Hebrew medical diagram, the human body is mapped onto a house: the stomach becomes a kitchen; the lungs, latticed windows.
Was an alien woman really cast back into the sea after surfacing on the coast of Japan in 1803?
Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Machines.
Time travel with a hairpin twist: two women land in the psyche of Marie Antoinette in 1792, while she is thinking about 1789.
A mysterious staple of Buenos Aires nightlife in the 1910s and 20s, RauΜl Grigera was an audacious Afro-Argentine dandy, an eccentric bohemian icon, a man who called himself el murcieΜlago (the bat). Paulina L. Alberto examines the racial stories told by photographs, comic strips, and newspaper articles about a person many knew only as βel negro RaΓΊlβ, searching for the life behind the legend.
This silent picture offers a glimpse into the early activities of the Denishawn dance school.
To ward off attackers this mythical animal was said to expel excrement with a devastating explosive force.
The heart of this book is the sharp and disjointed accounts of survivors, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise.
Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the worldβs best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world.
Painted by an unidentified artist, these opera characters are gathered from literature, military history, and myth.
These images of the LA Alligator Farm depict a level of casual proximity unthinkable today.
An early guide to communicating in the language now known as Plains Indian Sign Language.
Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain β psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences.
Taking a child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal βcharactersβ: admiring exclamation marks and militaristic semicolons.
In these images, VΓ©rany realizes his ambition β to accurately render βthe suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the transparency and the coloringβ of cephalopods.
A collection of more than 60 sundial inscriptions, exploring various themes relating to the passing of time.