Skinner is one of the stranger figures of early British India, a soldier of mixed parentage who raised his own cavalry and commissioned books like this one. The pages are in the Company painting style, that hybrid of Mughal and European habits, and the detail in the dress and trades is the real draw. Linger on the pictures.

Apparently 1918 had a brief boom in cat-themed music, which is the sort of fact the Public Domain Review exists to rescue. This 1919 piece arrived at the tail of the craze, and the accompanying picture of a cat organ is a reminder that people have been putting cats and music together in questionable ways for centuries.

Before Photoshop there was the darkroom and a pair of scissors, and the boosters of early-1900s California used both with abandon. These exaggeration postcards show peaches the size of wagons and onions that need a crew to haul, all sold with a straight face. A cheerful little archive of the real-estate pitch as folk art.

Matchbooks were the business card, billboard and souvenir of half the twentieth century, and almost nobody kept them on purpose. A group now wants to treat them as primary sources, with research-grade cataloguing. The website isn't up yet, so file this as one to watch.

Every age gets the shortcut to expertise it deserves. Long before anyone typed a prompt, scholars hoped a magical book could spare them years of study, and the Public Domain Review headline does not let the parallel go to waste. Pay attention to the demons, which are the part the sales pitch left out.

Most people could not place the planet's biggest mammal migration, and it isn't the one with the wildebeest. Look at the map itself: GPS tracks from a few hundred collars pile up until they read like spider silk, and the people working on it call them lines of life. Cartography where the ink walked there on its own.

A delusion with a timeline: it turns up in medical records just as lenses were reshaping how Europe saw things. Sanderson's essay treats it less as a curiosity than as a way of saying what couldn't otherwise be said, which is a far better reading than the usual snickering. Charles VI's reinforced clothes are the famous footnote.

National myth-making rarely looks this good. What's worth noticing is the ambition: not just pretty scenes of a lost past, but a whole visual archive built to stand up against Christian imagery. Public Domain Review is at its best with this sort of sincere, slightly unhinged project.

Nearly eight metres of silk on which two painting traditions meet and get along remarkably well. Castiglione brought European perspective and shading to the Qing court and fitted them into Chinese technique, and the horses repay a slow scroll. A quiet thing to look at for a minute or ten.

Before the haystacks, there was a teenager who knew people would pay to be mocked. Public Domain Review gathers Monet's early caricatures from the late 1850s, and the pleasure is seeing a famous eye for light aimed at noses instead. A reminder that even the Impressionists had a side hustle.

One for the marvels shelf. Public Domain Review files it between bestiary and medical treatise, which is about where the sixteenth century kept most of its anxieties. The appeal is the provenance as much as the monsters: a Tudor royal manuscript full of wonders, and no need for a reader ticket.

Most museum collections are excellent and each one has its own slightly grim search page, so pooling them behind one visual interface is a real kindness. The Rijksmuseum and NASA in the same results is exactly the sort of juxtaposition this category exists for. Budget an afternoon.

Ask a few hundred thousand people playing a daily game to sketch borders and average the results, and you get something between a real map and a mental one. The fun is seeing which borders the crowd knows cold and which dissolve into wishful wobbling. There are timelapses too, so you can watch collective geography come into focus.

A whole divination manual devoted to snakes is exactly the kind of thing the archives are for. The Victorian packaging is half the charm: a learned society in Bombay soberly translating a book of snake omens. The lead image of Zahhak chained on Damavand is a good one too.

Victorian audiences paid to see this sort of thing projected on a wall, and frankly the entertainment budget has only gone downhill since. The title gives the flea its proper Latin name and the man no name at all, which tells you who the star is. It's a single image and a two-second read, ideal for an idle moment.