From Birmingham-Southern College's 1996 yearbook.  See this surprising history of the Ampersand.

"& that's just the half of it."  From George Fox College's 1995 yearbook.

From Youth's Companion, 1873.  Answer: Chinese astronomers recorded a conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury with the moon on Feb. 28, 2446 B.C.

Today's bearded ampersand is from Take One magazine, 1968.

From Black Cats & Four-Leaf Clovers by Harry Oliver.

From Indiana University's 1896 yearbook.  See Ampersand.

From Barnard College's 1897 yearbook.

We would have used not an exclamation point to symbolize "risky" but rather an asterisk, which has "risk" in its very name.  From Right, Wrong, and Risky by Mark Davidson.

Thanks to Ken Ronkowitz for being inspired to ponder ampersands based upon what he calls "a curious little book by a wonderfully odd author, Craig Conley, which is logically titled Ampersand."

From The Film Daily, 1922.

We can now reveal that the mystery light seen in the skies over New Zealand in 1978 was, in fact, a celestial ampersand.  For insightful tips on how to interpret punctuation in the sky (such as in cloud formations), see Divination by Punctuation.  From UFO Newsclipping Service, 1986.

From A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré, 2008.

"I was fast developing into a mammoth interrogation point, and I would rather have been an ampersand, or anything else in the shape of a contraction of my condition."  From A Home Course in Mental Science by Helen Wilmans, 2014.

A Journey From This World to the Next, &c. by Henry Fielding, 1743.

A, B & C (or, technically, A, C & B -- the logo of Adam and Charles Black publishers, London, 1913).

Here's a precursor to Gary Barwin's ampersand collages.  From Die Bühne, 1926.  Our lavishly illustrated Ampersand opus explores the history and pictography of the most common coordinating conjunction.

Here's an inverted ampersand from 1908.