Welcome to Nick Pelling's Cipher Mysteries, a blog full of curious and wonderful unsolved/unbroken historical code/cipher mysteries (together with stuff to do with the invention of the telescope). This site covers not only non-fiction discussions of historical ciphers, but also takes a sideways look at the many other places where these appear - books, films, TV, radio, music, opera, sculpture, metalworking, eBay scams, etc.
PS: for more about this site, click here.
Here’s something that was a surprise for me, perhaps it will surprise you too: “People of the Book“, a 2008 novel by Geraldine Brooks, teasing out (imagined) story after story from the margins, stains and marks left on “the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts” (thus spake Wikipedia). One Amazon customer reviewer [...]
Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here’s a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels…
(2008) El castillo de las estrellas Enrique Joven [mentioned here]
Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia [...]
While adding categories to some old blog posts just now, up popped a mention of the Karlsruhe Virtual Katalog (KVK). I normally use KVK to find specific non-fiction holdings: but today I wondered what otherwise-unknown Voynich masterpieces it might be able to tell me about. At Dennis Stallings’ prompting, I’ve just started to add non-English Voynich novels to my Big Fat List, [...]
Anyone in the UK wanting a cheap copy of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” might consider heading on over to ebay.co.uk, where one has just been put up for sale. It’ll be interesting to see how much it gets… happy bargain hunting!
Errrm… signed copies are still available from the author yada yada [...]
Two up-to-the-minute papers on the Vinland Map (the Beinecke’s other “VM”) for your delectation and delight.
Firstly, a 2008 paper by Garman Harbottle called “The Vinland Map: a critical review of archaeometric research on its authenticity” in Archaeometry, 50, pp.177-89 - this tries to discredit / undermine the analytical & spectroscopic chemical analyses of the Vinland Map by [...]
2009 begins, and - at long last - Cipher Mysteries has lurched back up to PageRank 3 (”PR3″), which is the height it had reached back when it was still with Blogger.
But because of all the super-duper WordPress plugins (like Tim Trott’s Folding Categories plugin, etc), visitors are now finding more of what they’re interested in here, and [...]
Sometimes a passing comment can open up a brief window onto an otherwise lost world. A 2002 email I made to the VMs mailing list I stumbled upon earlier today brought to mind one such instance, and six years on I found myself wondering just what had been said, what had been going on in a very particular context. [...]
A few weeks back, I posted about perhaps meeting up in London to dole out a few of my towering pile of Voynich- and cipher-related books over a pint or two. Well, here’s a date, time and place for it: 6.30pm, 5th January 2009, at the Cittie of York pub on Chancery Lane.
Anybody who wants to turn [...]
And so up pops a delightful article by Eileen Reeves, who Cipher Mysteries regulars may remember as the author of “Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror”. Her paper, called “Of Language and the Lodestone”, covers a peculiarly Renaissance phenomenon: baptizing magnets with holy water and unholy words (nomina barbara, which Reeves summarizes as “foreign utterances whose [...]
Something new just pinged on Cipher Mysteries’ bank of cultural radar screens: “Voynich Volume 1″ by Hiromi Taihei (a manga artist who has previously published works in the young adult / science fiction genres) is due for release on 20 January 2009 - let me know if you see a copy.
Back in 2005, Elmar Vogt mentioned some [...]
