Eerie Baroque paintings of imaginary ruins and other fantastic architecture by a proto-surrealist master.

Images have long provided a means of protesting political regimes bent on censoring language. In the 1830s a band of French caricaturists, led by Charles Philipon, weaponized the innocent image of a pear to criticize the corrupt and repressive policies of King Louis-Philippe. Patricia Mainardi sinks her teeth into the history of this early nineteenth-century meme.

The strange, unhappy life of W. W. Denslow, the illustrator of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Groundbreaking study of humanity’s affect on physical geography by the American statesman, philologist, and conservationist George Perkins Marsh.

Our top pick of those whose works on 1st January 2020 enter the public domain in many countries around the world.

A Christmas classic about two children who get lost in the blinding snow, by the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, beloved by W. G. Sebald, W. H. Auden, Hannah Arendt, and Thomas Mann.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been many things to many people — a Christian epic, a comment on the English Civil War, the epitome of poetic ambiguity — but it is first of all a pleasure to read. Drawing on sources as varied as Wordsworth, Hitchcock, and Conan Doyle, author Philip Pullman considers the sonic beauty and expert storytelling of Milton's masterpiece, and the influence it has had on his own work.

Hand-coloured cards engraved by Sidney Hall representing the constellations, from Aquarius to Ursa Major.

A book of Greenlandic Inuit folktales collected by the legendary explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen.

Images of the Aurora Borealis through the history of art.