From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's 1923 yearbook.

From The Path To Rome by Hilaire Belloc.

From the University of Missouri at Kansas City's 1960 yearbook.

"Strange keys to the powers of the universe."  From Weird Tales, 1942.

From Butler's 1917 yearbook.

Here's some visual poetry from Barnard's 1908 yearbook.

Before you look at the caption, can you identify the markings on this telephone booth?  From Lighted Pathway, 1981.

We noticed an unusual set of ESP cards in the extrasensory newsletter L'Insolite, 1980.  Instead of the classic Zener symbols of hollow circle, plus sign, three vertical wavy lines, hollow square, and hollow pentagram, here we find a checkerboard, a circle with eight rays, three overlapping rings, two V's forming an X, and a hollow rectangle.  We attempted to restore these alternative symbols in a print-resolution file for you to download.

Our own alternative telepathy test (free online and app versions) was commissioned by our friends at the Official Prisoner Appreciation Society, dedicated to the cult 1967 TV series The Prisoner.  In the episode entitled "The Schizoid Man," actor Patrick McGoohan uses a special deck of symbol cards to test Extra Sensory Perception, slightly different from the Zener set.  Exercise your own inner eye.

From Pure Logic by William Stanley Jevons, 1864.  The text reads, "Let it be borne in mind that the letters A, B, C, &c., as well as the marks +, 0, and =, afterwards to be introduced, are in no way mysterious symbols."  However, we found some rather mysterious meanings of A, B, C for our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, and some even more mysterious meanings of &c for our book entitled Ampersand.

An entire chapter of type symbols, from Judy, Or The London Serio-Comic Journal, 1869.

Here are some uncanny mystical ciphers from Zanoni by Edward Bulwer Lytton, 1856.

"It is not a good idea to combine symbols; the forces that stand behind them can easily start to mingle."
—The Angel in the West Window, Gustav Meyrink's novel of the Elizabethan magus John Dee (our own 9th cousin)