The Public Domain Review
Vol. 13 #8
New Essay
Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce
In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit relations beget terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth.
New Collection Items
Distortions and Grimaces: Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921)
A fantasia of travellers and archipelago dwellers, illustrated in a chimerical fashion by the author.
Signs and Wonders: Celestial Phenomena in 16th-Century Germany
From the mid-sixteenth century, broadsheets depicting wondrous, celestial events circulated widely across the Holy Roman Empire against the backdrop of the Reformation.
Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Occult Chemistry (1908)
A chemistry treatise that weds the hard sciences with theosophical insight, making a microscope of the psychic mind.
PDR Revisited
Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī’s Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century)
Illustrations of inventive machines from a copy of Muslim polymath Ismail al-Jazarī’s Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.
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