Did you know the everyman John Doe shortened his name when he immigrated (as did John Q. Public, who was originally of the proud Publicus line)?  We find John Doughgob's original signature in The American Legion Weekly, Dec. 23, 1921.

The largest crystal ball we've encountered, from The Saturday Evening Post, 1839.

"Form your own opinion and hold it. ... We disappear out of each other's lives for ever."  From A Veldt Official by Bertram Mitford, 1895.

An illustration from The Blue Poetry Book by Andrew Lang (1891).  The caption reads: "Or is that sound, betwixt laughter and scream, The voice of the Demon who haunts the stream?"

Here's a precursor to the 1927 film It, with Clara Bow as the "it girl."  Our illustration is by L. Hurley for The Echo yearbook of Greensboro College, 1921.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

The alphabet departed this life on May 15, 1898, as we learn in Out-of-Door Memorials: Mausoleums, Tombs, Headstones and All Forms of Mortuary Monuments, 1898.

From Life and Character of William Taylor Baker, 1908.

"Sir Anthony looked despairingly at the telephone."  From Tom Chester's Sweetheart by Joseph Hatton, 1895.

From the Haverford College Athletic Annual and 1900 Class Book.

At the end of The Maltese Falcon, the priceless statuette is at large.  But did you know it ended up at stately Wayne Manor?  Our proof appears in episode 22 of Batman.  This is perhaps not so very surprising, as "the world of The Maltese Falcon is similar to that of the TV version of Batman and Robin" (John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 1994).

"Yes, an entire picture comes forth as you connect the dots." —Daveta Brown, Are You Ready for the Frontline?

The visual gag of dashing out slathered in shaving cream has literary origins, as we see (for example) in Travel and Adventure in Northern Queensland by Arthur C. Bicknell, 1895.

"Alone in space."  From Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour by Charles Dixon, 1895.

Here's a buzzard from The Adventures of Bob White by Thornton Waldo Burgess, 1919.

From The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, In Prose and Verse, 1881.

Potatoes from heaven, apparently, and a precursor to this 1949 story of firefighters in the Sierra Nevada Mountains who dumbfoundedly watched as a supply plane dropped a hundred-pound sack of potatoes directly atop a full-sized iron stove that had been carried by mules to the peak.  Our heavenly potatoes illustration appears in Prodigiorvm ac Ostentorvm Chronicon, 1557.

Here's a precursor to the Aerosmith song "Love in an Elevator," from The Dove's Nest and Other Tales, 1886.  The caption reads, "Love in a lift."

There's a longstanding rumor that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" hails Satan when played backwards.  What could be more natural?  A fall from heaven is the equal and opposite reaction to an ascent to heaven, as we see in this card from a magic deck that the eminent mentalist Kenton Knepper commissioned of us.

The Devil and Medusa dancing the Cachuca, from A Fortnight in Ireland by Francis Bond Head, 1852.