‘British Library’ category posts - « Cipher Mysteries »
In London, just along from St Pancras lies the British Library, one of the most famous libraries in the world: a fabulous treasurehouse of, well, book stuff.
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To gain access to its overcrowded Reading Rooms, you’ll need to get yourself a Reader Pass, which these days (somewhat scandalously, I think) merely being a tax-payer doesn’t entitle you to. You’ll also need to persuade the gatekeepers exactly why your local library’s capacious collection of Ruth Rendell novels is insufficient for your research. A letter from your employer, lecturer, or parole officer would probably help here.
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Naturally, the BL has a truly fabulous collection of manuscripts, maps, letters, incunabula, etc that you would simply love to have a look at. However, in these days of high-profile map theft, you’ll need to ask it well in advance if you want to examine any such wonderful object for yourself. Oh, and for this, you’ll probably also need a supporting letter from your University Dean, your Archbishop, your local MP, or the Queen. Good luck!
Posted by nickpelling on Jan 1st, 2010 - 3 comments.
While searching for things to do with the humanist minuscule hand, I stumbled across a reference in a short 2002 paper by Jessica Wilbur to an oversized 1981 hardback by Jacqueline Herald called "Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500". Now, I thought, that sounds like a book I'd really like to buy: only to find out from ...
Posted by nickpelling on Oct 7th, 2009 - 6 comments.
A fascinating email just arrived at Cipher Mansions from Tony Gaffney, our virtual cryptologer-in-residence at the British Library. While looking at BL Add. MS 39660 recently, he noticed a set of dates for ten popes written in an unusual mixture of Roman numbers and Arabic numerals ("an9 pm9" = "annus primus", and "ufq3" = "usque"):-...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 30th, 2009 - 12 comments.
Every few years, I get around to posting a list of Voynich challenges - things about the Voynich Manuscript that we would like to know or to find out.
Looking back at my 2001 list of Voynich Challenges, I seem to have been flailing around at every codicological nuance going: yes, there are hundreds of interesting angles to consider - ...
Posted by nickpelling on May 21st, 2009 - 4 comments.
For ages, I've been planning to devote a day at the British Library solely to the task of looking for matches for the Voynich Manuscript's unusual quire numbers. There's a long description of these quire numbers elsewhere on this website, but the short version is that they are "abbreviated longhand Latin ordinals in a fifteenth century hand", and are ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jan 18th, 2009.
A huge thanks to the indefatigable Tony Gaffney who very kindly took the time recently to double-check my transcriptions (some of them derived from Augusto Buonafalce's transcriptions) of Bellaso's various challenge ciphers against the copies held in the British Library.
Of the twelve corrections he suggested, roughly half were typos on my part, while the remainder were places where I had transcribed punctuation-like marks ...
Posted by nickpelling on Nov 21st, 2008.
While snooping around the (mostly empty) user subsites on Glen Claston's Voynich Central, I came across a page by someone called Robin devoted solely to the Scorpio "Scorpion" page in the VMs. This has an unusual drawing of a scorpion (or salamander) at the centre, and which I agree demands closer attention......
Posted by nickpelling on Nov 10th, 2008 - 1 comment.
As a Brit, there's a very particular class of American-made sequel that fills my film-watching soul with despair. On planes and slow Sundays, you've doubtless caught a few exemplars yourself: "Garfield 2", "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London", "National Lampoon's European Vacation" all spring readily to my mind, but these form but the tip of a particularly yellow-coloured iceberg.
The template is horrifically simple: having ...
Posted by nickpelling on Oct 6th, 2008 - 6 comments.
I've just heard back from the British Library Manuscript department about BL MS Add. 10035, "The Subtelty of Witches", which I mentioned here a few days ago: "unfortunately it does not begin in English. The whole of the manuscript is written in cipher."
So: was Eric Sams mistaken? Might the British Library actually have two unreadable books? Well... after a rather longer trawl through ...
Posted by nickpelling on Oct 2nd, 2008 - 6 comments.
Are you an historian with an enciphered document you want to read? If so, here's a link to an article you really ought to have a look at: "Cryptanalysis and Historical Research" by Eric Sams, from Archivaria 21 (1985-1986) [it's actually an extended version of two earlier ...
