Skip to main content

Affinities, a Book of Images to Celebrate 10 Years of The Public Domain Review

In a similar way to how Open Culture aims to distill in one place the web’s high-quality free cultural and educational media, so The Public Domain Review aims to help readers explore the vast (and sometimes overwhelming!) sea of public domain works available online — like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond. Celebrating curious and beautiful public domain images is at the very heart of what we do, and so it seemed fitting to mark our 10th anniversary with a big and beautiful book of images. Ever since the project began back in 2011, readers have implored us to do one, and so finally here it is…  we are extremely excited to bring out into the world AFFINITIES.

Gathering over 500 prints, paintings, illustrations, sketches, photographs, doodles, and everything in between, the book is a carefully curated journey exploring echoes and connections across more than two millennia of visual culture. Assembled according to a dreamlike logic, the images unfurl in a single unbroken sequence, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads.

While it’s taken the best part of a year to create (a true lockdown baby), this has really been 10 years in the making — a book born from a decade of deep immersion in public domain archives.

A compelling object and experience in its own right, Affinities also acts as a launchpad for further discoveries and inventive engagements with the commons. It’s meticulous sourcing points to works, creators, and collections around the world, serving as a gateway for future forays into the digital public domain.

As for the physical book itself, we wanted to create an object as stunning as the images within. It is large format (28 x 21.5cm / 11 x 8.5”), boasts a cloth-bound hardcover, with a foil stamped title and embossed inset image, and extends across a whopping 368 pages. To help get this beauty made and assure the highest quality production, we are very happy to have teamed up with specialist art book publisher Volume, an imprint of Thames & Hudson.

It’s being sold via a crowdfunder and delivery will be early next year. In addition to the standard edition of the book, we’ve worked with Volume to create a special Collector’s Edition (in a slipcase with limited edition poster) and also a set of limited edition prints. All of the offerings are only available during the campaign. 

Learn more, and order your copy, over on the crowdfunder page.

Adam Green is co-founder, creator, and main editor of The Public Domain Review and PDR Press.

Affinities, a Book of Images to Celebrate 10 Years of The Public Domain Review is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3e2yAqm
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more