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 world’s 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 — 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 “characters”: admiring exclamation marks and militaristic semicolons.

In these images, Vérany realizes his ambition — to accurately render “the suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the transparency and the coloring” of cephalopods.

A collection of more than 60 sundial inscriptions, exploring various themes relating to the passing of time.

From cabbage green to course meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how physicians could divine sexual history, disease, and impending death by studying the body's liquid excretions.

In this “personal guidance” film, Phil the shy guy learns a valuable lesson: to fit in, you need to “think about the other guy”.

In these illustrations, Emerson's words are interpreted literally, repurposed for cheeky, teasing, and toothless ends.

A sprawling eighty-page poem about teeth, written by an eminent dentist, with fifty pages of erudite endnotes.

These watercolour images depict a lost 19th-century Manhattan of grand country estates and vast private gardens.

Beneath the waves, off the Suffolk Coast, lies a city taken by the sea through centuries of erosion. Matthew Green revisits Dunwich, a once lively port transfigured into a symbol of loss, both eerie and profound, for generations of artists, poets, and historians drawn to its ruinous shores.

This form of folk art from 17th- and 18th-century Pennsylvania was designed for private, domestic pleasures.

In this essay on the ailments of sedentary lifestyles, reading and scholarly study have tragic and sometimes fatal consequences.

These 18th-century microscopic illustrations offer wonderful glimpses into the minutiae of the natural world.

During the late 1660s in Paris, transfusing the blood of calves and lambs into human veins held the promise of renewed youth and vigour. Peter Sahlins explores Jean Denis’ controversial experiments driven by his belief in the moral superiority of animal blood: a substance that could help redeem the fallen state of humanity.

Eigil zu Tage-Ravn asks a GTP-3-driven AI system for help in the interpretation of a key scene in Moby-Dick (1851). Do androids dream of electric whales?

Rising to prominence in the seventeenth century, the Basohli School of painting is particularly known for its vibrant use of color and inventive textural elements — including iridescent beetle carapaces.

Offering hundreds of examples from religious history, this book was part of a larger Phallic Series of treatises by Hargrave Jennings.

When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus in utero, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings.