D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma”, now a downloadable PDF!
A highly surprising message just arrived here at Cipher Mysteries from our Chaocipher Clearing House chum Moshe Rubin:-
Is your readership aware that NSA has placed the entire text [of Mary D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma"] on its site?
I couldn’t find the link on your site so here it is!
This is a great find, highly recommended for all Voynich researchers - if you haven’t read it already, download it straight away! Having said that, even though it took me six attempts to download it completely (doubtless they were tracert’ing me to see if I just happened to be a terrorist, bless ‘em), I did get it all in the end. But please let me know if this happens to get removed (which is always possible).
Incidentally, this is just one of a number of cryptological history publications the NSA has kindly made available on its website. The 2007 article by John Clabby on Brigadier John Tiltman (“A Giant Among Cryptanalysts“) is also well worth looking at (though not nearly so essential as D’Imperio, naturally).
March 24th, 2009 at 5:09 am
A splendid discovery, Nick! Thanks! I put the link on my own Voynich site.
Cheers,
Dennis
March 25th, 2009 at 12:29 am
I’d also like to thank you– I’ve been trying for a while without any success to get this from libraries.
March 27th, 2009 at 9:10 am
I am a bit disappointed about content of this book because of better common view was appeared for me from manuscript pages and Internet material. Books are like all other world’s things – they changes, and IMHO now this book is more interesting only from historical perspective… Especially if we’ll remember that at time of book’s publishing there wasn’t such thing as Internet
March 27th, 2009 at 10:54 am
It is certainly true that D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma” is a research artefact from another era entirely. Even so, I would contend that her book remains a far more useful resource than 99% of the (roughly) 48,400 webpages found by Google for “+Voynich +Manuscript”.
Hopefully, before very long even these webpages will look outdated.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
[...] Miscellaneous (including the NSA report on the Voynich Manuscript) [...]
December 28th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Many thanks for the link!
Looks like nsa.gov server blocks foreign IP-addresses. I finally downloaded the book using TOR with an exit in U.S.
I also noticed some missed pages (e.g. #76). Still top NSA secrets?