Public Domain Review’s (@publicdomainrev@mastodon.social) Sunday Read this week features depictions of Cholera and infrastructure failure. Maybe in the face of defunding public health and deregulation we should dust off some of these prints.

A detailed black-and-white woodcut print depicting a chaotic scene inside a ballroom. In the center stands Death, personified as a tall, robed skeleton who holds two long human bones together as if playing a violin. On the floor around him lie the collapsed, lifeless bodies of three masquerade ball attendees still dressed in their festive clothing. In the upper-left background, a band of musicians holding brass instruments flees the room in terror. In the background to the right, a grim figure representing Cholera sits ominously on a set of stairs, dressed in an exotic Egyptian-style costume.

A dramatic, high-contrast black-and-white composite illustration depicting a machine-age “Dance of Death” through dual transportation disasters. On one side, a colossal skeleton crouches beneath a fractured railway bridge, tearing up the tracks with its bare hands and sending a steam locomotive plunging vertically into an abyss of jagged wreckage and thick smoke. On the other side, amid a chaotic web of dark ink lines, a grinning skeleton emerges from the twisted, overturned debris of a violent, early 20th-century automobile crash, highlighting the fatal toll of modern industrial progress.

Nic Babarskis @thebigbabooski