Cipher Mysteries

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!] * * * * * * * The crew were spending the rest of the day on those interminable fly-past shots of the Voynich Manuscript all modern documentary editors demand, their rostrum camera a microlight buzzing across a lightly-inked vellum landscape. But Marina ...

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!] * * * * * * * Absent-mindedly dusting breadcrumbs off a beard no longer there, Graydon Harvitz paused in thought at the glass doors of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Was the building a sublime symphony in concrete for keeping ...

I recently found an old email from Sander Manche mentioning his Voynich blog: going through its pages just now, one particular post on letters hidden in Voynich plants jumped out at me. To be precise, it discussed a single symbol that appears to have been hidden in the middle of the plant drawings on both f20r......

Wowza - the long-awaited chemical analysis of the Voynich Manuscript's inks by the McCrone Institute (you know, the one commissioned for Andreas Sulzer's 2009 ORF documentary on the VMs) has just appeared sans fanfare on the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library's Voynich page. Feel free to read the report as a PDF, though note that it wouldn't render ...

With 2012 - the centenary of Wilfrid Voynich's 1912 purchase of his subsequently-eponymous manuscript - inching ever closer, we will doubtless soon see a broad international wave of quick-turnaround documentary makers sniffing around its margins, snuffling for pungent historical truffles in the florilegial undergrowth of the Interweb. If, dear reader, that thumbnail profile just happens to describe you, then here's what you need: a ...

Amid the me-too Voynich blog repost deluge of recent days comes - at long last - some genuinely new information courtesy of the Yale Daily News. From talking with the Beinecke's Assistant Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts Kathryn James, we now learn that:- Andreas Sulzer (the film maker) was originally utterly convinced that the VMs was 17th century, and ...

Last week  (3rd February 2011) saw the US premiere of "The Book That Can't Be Read", the long-awaited National Geographic channel airing of the recent ORF documentary on the Voynich Manuscript. Though it prominently features the benign beardiness of everyone's favourite Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen, for a pleasant change the star of the show is undoubtedly the manuscript itself, with the ...

For a while, I've had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn't work out how to scratch. You see... about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of ...

London, UK, 11 Nov 2010. In a surprising twist worthy of Voldemort himself, A-list children's author and philanthropist J.K.Rowling has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the popular Internet cipher mystery meme "The Voynich Manuscript". She now says it all was a 1990 publicity stunt for an early release of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", which was - much like Norwegian band's a-ha's 1985 hit single ...

Such a stupid thing for a bright kid to do: pinballing through her mid-teen rebellion, Jena Kyng had wanted to demonstrate some kind of unbranded online tribal allegiance, and ended up with two lines of Voynichese across her lower back (from the end paragraph of page f67r2, as if anyone off-list really cared). Though in many ways, she'd had a lucky escape: imagine ending ...