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I used to think ampersands were a trendy 1970s affectation like flared pants, too, until I looked into it. In fact it's older than Shakespeare - older in fact than Middle English. The typographical scholar (and poet) Robert Bringhurst says "the ampersand is a symbol evelved from the Latin "et", meaning and. It is one of the oldest alphabetic abbreviations, and it has assumed over the centuries a wonderful variety of forms. . . . Earlier typographers made liberal use of ampersands, expecially when setting italic - and relished their variety of form. The 16th-century French printer Cristophe Plantin sometimes used four quite different ampersands in the course of a single paragraph, even when setting something as unwhimsical as the eight-volume polylingual Bible on which he risked his fortune and to which he devoted more than six years of his life." Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of Typographic Style" (second edition, 1997), Hartley & Marks, Vancouver, ISBN 0-88179-132-6. John Tranter, Sydney %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%