Affinities: A Journey Through Images from The Public Domain Review
£31.50£42.80 (-26%)
Gathering a remarkable collection of over 500 public domain images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, the book has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogues, ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence which unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads – hatching eggs twin with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep-sea coral.
At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. Its playful and imaginative space invites the reader to transcend familiar categories of epoch, style, or historical theme, and to instead revel in a new world of creative possibilities played out between the images – opening up new connections, ways of seeing, and forms of knowledge.
Praise for The Public Domain Review
‘An Aladdin’s cave of curiosity … the best thing on the web’ Guardian
‘A gold mine of fantastic images and stories’ The New York Times
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Additional information
| Publisher | 1st edition (26 May 2022), Thames and Hudson Ltd |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 368 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0500025207 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0500025208 |
| Dimensions | 22.35 x 3.81 x 28.96 cm |
by Bardigiano
Incredible anthology from the brilliant Public Domain Review, from cryptozoology, Edwardian science fiction and Medieval geometry to anatomy, colour charts, comets and whales.
by Robin
This is one of those books that can be opened on any page and you’ll be immediately intrigued by the image. it could be a page from an 1883 Japanese fireworks catalogue, a 1920 photo of two men recreating a traffic accident using miniature cars, or Vincenzo Requeno’s 1779 system for signing numbers with fingers. The five hundred images are all in the public domain and originally appeared on the Public Domain Review website (and well worth a visit).
Fittingly, the first image in the book is Robert Fludd’s 1617 black canvas depicting the time just before the creation of the universe. I thought the strength of the book is that it doesn’t lower the tone and have historical freaks of nature pictures or gruesome human activity from the past. Every page has some thought-provoking work and luckily everything is captioned and as added extra captions with an asterisk have extended mini-essays on the back pages.
An amazing book for anyone who is intellectually curious. You can look inside the book at Westread Book Reviews then click 2022 and June.
by Alex S Wilson
Quite a wonderful book that fires the imagination. The selection of figures is quite amazing. However the whole package is let down, actually ruined by the publishers or authors choice of font. The Introduction uses a font of size and clarity that should have set the standard for the book.
Instead the remaining and most important part of the book uses a stupidly small and faint font! The captions and extensive notes for all figures use this inaccessible font.
For the experience of viewing the figures, get the book. For the accompanying notes and full experience, forget it.
I really cannot recommend the book given the choices made by the publisher.
by Robin
What a stunning, beautifully produced book of intriguing and inventive images in the public domain, linked together in fascinating thematic strings. A bargain at the price, and a credit to the author and the publisher (Thames and Hudson). This is a book for the senses, and beats hugely the comparatively sterile experience of looking at the same images on a flat computer screen (with boring clickable icons intruding and distracting at the edges). I hope the author is minded to develop the idea further with other volumes focusing perhaps more extensively on individual themes.
by Michael C-R
I bought this book for my wife’s birthday.
She absolutely loves it
Very well presented and packaged and excellent quality paper meaning it weighs a ton!
Gorgeous book!