Ampersands

Ampersand royalty?  Here's "His Grace the Dook of Ampassy-Etcetera" (All the Year Round, Sept. 22, 1866).  It's a page from our rare collection of ampersand lore, entitled simply Ampersand.  So extraordinary are the nuggests we gathered that a prominent website dedicated to ampersands was afraid to review our book, thinking we had made it all up.  They didn't realize the pleasure we take in citing legitimate sources; that's what makes our painstaking research so much fun — to uncover incredible truths that we can actually back up.  Meanwhile, a courteous bow to Duke Ampersand may be in order.  (By the way, the Duke's name, "Ampassy-Etcetera," is one of the great many surprising synonyms for "ampersand" that we have collected in our book.  We're honored that our glossary was reproduced in Edvin Thungren's book The Ampersand.)

Here's a treble clef ampersand from The American Annual of Photography, 1892.

Ampersands are held together by sections of chain and screws, as we see in this illustration from 1886.  See the very strange history of the ampersand in the book called Ampersand.

"An ampersand, that convoluted piece of plumber's piping." —Joseph Skibell, A Curable Romantic

This book was ordered by mistake.  But it was one of those little gems.  Get a copy & judge for yourself.

We're honored to have contributed a chapter to Edvin Thungren's new book, The Ampersand, viewable here.

Like an 'ampersand' religious believer, an 'ampersand' political citizen is trying to square an impossible circle.
—Dual Citizenship, Birthright Citizenship, and the Meaning of Sovereignty (2005)

While decorative type ornaments are predominantly botanical in nature, punctuation marks betray bestial origins.  The ampersand, for example, descends from a snakelike fish.  See this most unusual book about ampersands through history: Ampersand.

Ha! I know the facial expression well, having experienced that "amperbang moment" once or twice (i.e. too many times) myself.