Cipher Mysteries

Here's something a bit unexpected: a teen novel built around school rivalries, DNA testing, the Voynich Manuscript and the Phaistos Disc. Due to come out in February 2010, could "That's Life, Samara Brooks" be the first properly crossover Voynich-themed book to add to the Cipher Mysteries Big Fat List? I'll be sure to get a copy along the ...

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 magazine), I'm ...

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 ...

Wah, looky heyuh - it's another Voynich novel to add to my big fat list. Retired chemical industry R&D / sales guy Baz Cunningham will be signing copies of his third novel "The Voynich Enigma" next Saturday morning (15th Nov 2008) in New Martinsville, WV. In the book, a couple of sharp-witted cousins find the key to the VMs on their ...

In much the same way that the Voynich Manuscript has provided a blank screen for generations of amateur cryptologists to project their code-breaking desires onto, it has in recent years provided a rich loam for writers to plant their novelistic seeds into. In the bad old days of novel-writing, the VMs would simply have been treated as an interchangeable cipher-based ...

Blogger "Frog Princess" spent a Sunday in Oxford taking randomesque pictures of flowers, muffins, shoes and cherry beer (sounds like an OK day to me), while thinking about vampires: her blog entry received a comment by "seraphim_grace" mentioning yet another Voynich book I hadn't heard previously heard of... "Deliver Us From Evil" (2000) by Brit author Tom Holland ...

I've been meaning to put this Big Fat List of English-language Voynich-related novels together for a while: I've appended links to the most significant review / blog mentions I've made about them. I'll update this every once in a while, so please feel free to drop me a line if you have or know of a Voynich-themed book you ...

Today, I stumbled across yet another Voynich book: which then led me to a whole cache of them, like a hidden nest of gremlin eggs high atop a mountain. Don't give them any water, whatever you do... First up was "Les Livres Maudits" (1971, J'ai Lu) by Jacques Bergier, chemical engineer and [al]chemist, French resistance fighter and spy, writer and ...

This 2006 oeuvre by Matthew Thomas Farrell in three PDF parts (1, 2 , and 3) seems destined for the Big Fat List of Voynich books/screenplays. Lots of mysterious international dealers in information, Referees, odd (code) names, odd conspiracies, a little bit of Area 51, you get the idea. It's a bit hard to describe (and, ...

Today's addition to The Big Fat List is "L'UOMO NELLA LUCE" by Walter Martinelli (2007), published on-demand by Lulu. Though I'm not quite sure whether bundling the Voynich Manuscript in with the Templars, the Masons, the Pyramids, Hitler, JFK, Christopher Columbus and the Bermuda Triangle is a brilliantly sensible idea: it sounds more like a kind of ...