Here’s just a few of the responses that have come in so far, in answer to our poll “What skull would you steal, and why?” Post your answer on Twitter (#cranio), or as a reply to this blog.

• I’m thinking if I could steal someone’s skull it might be Alice Paul. “Ms. I heard a speech and changed the world.”

• Omar Khayyam who spoke with such passion of the body’s dissolution would make a fine item of ossuary interest.

• Wm Wirt’s skull (again but not by me) as it might reveal ID of infant child bones ca 1960s found thrust & broken in his robbed tomb

• If I could steal any skull, it would be J S Bach’s, so I could experience his fugues the way he did when they 1st resounded there!

• Since nothing left of Joan of Arc, I say Nicholas II. Or Sarah Bernhardt! Or Proust! Too many choices. Also is kinda creepy.

• It would be Rob (numb) Skillingham’s cranium. He was in my class at school and had a head the size of a pumpkin.

• Well, assuming that the myth that drinking from it makes you see the future, Nostradamus’s skull would be my choice.

• Perhaps tortured Jan Potoki who rendered down a silver cross, forming a bullet, to end his worldly adventures.

• I would have to go with Shakespeare. Hamlet done with Shakespeare’s skull would be a fine performance.

• A skull to steal? Maybe Marie Antoinette b/c the hard part is done.

• I think I’d have to go with stealing da Vinci’s skull. A) He’d understand. B) My obsession goes back to when I was 11. C) Genius.

• Joseph Merrick’s (aka “Elephant Man”)

• If I were going to steal a head, my top three would be Lao Tzu, Tituba, and FDR.

• A skull to steal? Maybe Marie Antoinette b/c the hard part is done. Or David Byrne’s (AD obvs) b/c talking heads aren’t boring.

• Dante Alighieri – I don’t really want a skull, so I don’t think I’d actually steal it. I wouldn’t know do with it if I did.

• If I could steal a skull: Shakespeare’s from the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon or John Donne’s from St. Paul’s.

• To steal a skull, to have something both to tell and show, I’d take the noggin of the scribbler Edgar Allen Poe.

• Tough call, but I’d go with Emily Bronte, so I could take it outdoors on wuthering nights.

• I would dig Edgar Allan Poe’s skull so it could whisper scary stories to me at night.

Keep ‘em coming!

Also, I heard this awful, awful joke on NPR over the weekend, but it’s eerily appropriate for the book, so I thought I’d repeat it here:

Two gravediggers are digging up Beethoven’s grave in Vienna, and they’re about halfway there, when they start hearing music. After a second, they realize it’s Beethoven’s Third Symphony, only it’s backwards. They keep digging, and soon they’re hearing Beethoven’s Second Symphony, also backwards. One of the gravediggers says to the other, “What’s that noise?”, and the second says, “Oh that? That’s just Beethoven decomposing.”

I didn’t say it was funny.