"Beautiful stars!  In other days, / the prophets' eyes might read your rays; / and tell of many a strange event, / of warfare, and of warning sent."  From The Astrologer of the Nineteeth Century by Merlinus Anglicus Junior, 1825.

From Olga Romanoff by George Chetwynd Griffith and illustrated by Fred Jane, 1897.

From International Studio, 1920.

From International Studio, 1920.

From A Poet's Calendar by William Henry Davies, 1927.

Einstein said that God doesn't play dice, but here's evidence that God plays Tic Tac Toe, from Au Pays de Notre-Seigneur by A. Vannesson, 1890.

Talk about cycling under the stars.  From The Adventures of Six Young Men in the Wilds of Maine and Canada by Charles Asbury Stephens, 1884.

Did you know that the night sky features both a chair and the Platonic ideal of a chair?  Our illustration appears in St. Nicholas magazine, 1877.

From Songs of the Immortals, illustrated by Haldane Macfall, c. 1920.  (In honor of "Floating Head Friday.")

"The sky is pocked with stars.  What eyes the wise men must have had to see a new one in so many.  I wonder, were there fewer stars then?  I don't know.  I fancy there's a mystery in it." —The Lion in Winter

Our illustration appears in Pleasant Hours, 1887.

The law of spectral return:

"The light of those inconceivably distant stars in the Milky Way takes seventy thousand years to reach the earth; if there were a telescope powerful enough to bring the surface of one into view, the events we could observe, however much they appeared to be taking place before our eyes, would be things that had already been past for seventy thousand years.  The idea that shook him with its terrifying simplicity was that in the infinite expanse of the universe every event that had ever occurred must be preserved somewhere, as an image embalmed in light.  'Therefore,' he reasoned, 'there must exist the possibility—even if it is beyond the power of man—of bringing back the past?'"
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

--an excerpt from "Chance Abbreviation" by Ken Clinger.  Based in Pennsylvania, Ken is a prolific, visionary recording artist known as one of the "godfathers" of the underground home taping genre.