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 German manga in Blotch magazine which used Voynichese for the monsters’ language: though the picture he uploaded has long since disappeared, the speech bubbles said “dar shes shokey” (from f68v1), “ykeey ykeey” (from f89v1), and “ees aiir olcho” (probably made up).  We’ll have to wait and see what line Hiromi Taihei’s manga takes…

As an aside, I looked up the 13-digit EAN number (ISBN-13) for Voynich Volume 1 on a UPC database: to my surprise, it came up as being registered to the country of “BookLand” – this turns out to be a fictional country invented in the 1980s to hold article numbers for books (EAN codes have a country prefix, e.g. Indonesian barcodes start with “899” etc). Having recently spent so much time reading about the sixteenth century Republic of Letters, I found this wonderfully ironic – a 20th century Republic of Books, right under our book-reading noses, but disguised as numbers and hence invisible to our eyes. The secret life of numbers, eh?

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