A wonderful review of the Public Domain Review, of which I am co-founder, courtesy of the Reviews Editor at Full Stop:

Imagine stopping in a small, non-descript town on the way between here and there. You park your car, walk into the local diner and order some eggs, and maybe then some pie (damn good pie). The drive has been long and so you decide to take a walk to stretch your legs. Wandering down the little main street, you pass a store with a cluttered window; there are piles of gold-embossed books, a globe, a skull with a map to the unconscious etched onto it. You walk in and breathe in that sweet, sweet smell of musty books that always gets you. There’s a tabby cat curled up in the one spot of sun that has penetrated this temple of the esoteric and the forgotten.

These are the kinds of experiences that I’ve been led to believe are becoming endangered in the face of that great predator known colloquially as the internet. And yet, I recently had that very same dust-and-must-filled, heart-pattering feeling—the kind you get when surrounded by old books that nobody remembers and you never knew you wanted to read–while perusing, of all places, a website. The Public Domain Review is a beautifully curated collection of unusual and obscure books, images, sounds, and movies that the editors have dug up from the backrooms of the public domain and paired with a selection of new, longform essays that focus on this oft-ignored material. Books like The Medical Aspects of Death, and the Medical Aspects of the Human Mind and Wonderful Balloon Ascents, mingle with James Joyce’s newly public-domained Chamber Music, a pre-Dubliners collection of love poems. Buster Keaton’s hilarious slapstick gem The General is free to stream, the voices of Houdini and Florence Nightingale have been revived for the occasion, and some choice picture albums have been dusted off, including one of the spirit photographs of William Hope and one of the 1970s space colony art from NASA’s Ames Research Center. And all of them are rendered as beautiful facsimiles that perhaps don’t entirely recreate the experience of handling a book, but at least your allergies won’t kick in. In any case, browsing the site resulted in one of the most exciting, book-nerdy experiences I’ve had on the internet in a long, long time.