Today I learned

Baseball Digest,  Sept. 1946

Part of the fun of reading old books and magazines is coming across a word, a phrase, or a name that is presented as though everyone should know it - but I don't.  Finding the above in a 1946 magazine led me to look up the David Harum - Wikipedia entry.  

So then, it was a best-seller in the final years of the 19th Century, and turned into verbal shorthand still in use in 1946.  But by the time I came along, it had fallen into disuse, like "Fibber McGee's closet."

And, I've added a public domain copy of David Harum to my collection, just in case I ever dig in to my reading (now, a non-reading) list of books downloaded from the web.