"The Substance and the Shadow":  an illustration from a 1901 issue of Life magazine.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: Death finds a lucky penny.  Dedicated to the mysterious Gordon Meyer, who turned us on to the wonder that is Tim Powers.

An illustration from a 1907 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "The two of them looked at each other with much interest."

"Who are you?": an illustration from an 1897 issue of English Illustrated magazine.

An illustration from an 1896 issue of Scribner's magazine.  The caption reads: "They meet under death's shadow."

An illustration from an 1890 issue of Illustrated American magazine.

An illustration from a 1910 issue of Hampton's magazine.  The caption reads: "Luminous waves rolled toward me, covered with the faces of the dead.  I saw blue eyes all around the room."

An illustration from an 1890 issue of English Illustrated magazine.  The caption reads: "The secret of life and death was before her."

An illustration from an 1872 issue of Frank Leslie's Pleasant Hours magazine.

An illustration from an 1879 issue of Frank Leslie's Pleasant Hours magazine.

An illustration from a 1912 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "I saw the figure gliding toward me, its death-mask grinning as if with pleasure to find at least the room inhabited by a human—I marked the eyeholes of doom, seeming to glow red in the fire-lit room, and the bony hand holding on high what I guessed, I knew, to be a cup of poison meant for me!"

An illustration from an 1893 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "Death the final sovereign of the world."

"Shouldn't we be speaking of something more important than life and death?"
—Gustav Meyrink, The Angel of the West Window

An illustration from an 1887 issue of Scribner's magazine.  The caption reads: "Out of the night and the other world came into him the dead."

An illustration from a 1905 issue of Pall Mall magazine.  The caption simply reads: "Science."

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself.  Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be.  Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools.  Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
—Salman Rushdie

"Such is the power of wine.  It is, after all, the juice that comes from a dying grape—to get drunk is to know how it is to begin to die."
—Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings  (What a truly amazing read!)