Discussions of non-fiction books that focus on codes and ciphers, such as David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”.
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 my Big Fat List, [...] Read more »
Anyone in the UK wanting a cheap copy of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” might consider heading on over to ebay.co.uk, where one has just been put up for sale. It’ll be interesting to see how much it gets… happy bargain hunting!
Errrm… signed copies are still available from the author yada yada [...] Read more »
Here’s a novel explanation for the curious “aiin” and “aiir” pattern found throughout the Voynich Manuscript’s curious text (AKA Voynichese) that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.
In my 2006 book, I pointed out that the Voynichese stroke conventionally transcribed as “n” (in EVA) is actually far closer to a “v” with an embellished right stroke: I [...] Read more »
I’ve just added a new page to the Cipher Mysteries site that looks at the (historical) mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbers. This is an aspect of the VMs that has had relatively little coverage (apart from pp.15-18 of my book, *sigh*), yet which should form one of the key dating data.
Should be plenty there [...] Read more »
I suppose this is the review I’ve spent two years steeling myself for. No matter what book critics may say, reviewing other people’s books is an easy word-game to play (typically revolving around inserting themselves into the commentary): whereas putting your own writing under the same spotlight is something closer to therapy. What, with the benefit [...] Read more »
Google recently put up a large collection of images from Life Magazine: and as you’d expect, various Netizens are poring over the visually-rich archive to find anything unexpected, such as this unidentified number-based ciphertext from 1957. Frustratingly, searches of the Life archive seem to be limited to a maximum of 200 results, so you have [...] Read more »
A few days ago, chess-playing crypto guy Tony Gaffney emailed Cipher Mysteries about “The Subtelty Of Witches” in the British Library: I also blogged about his attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher and the (not-very-)Ancient Cryptography forum where he often posts on historical ciphers. Since then, the copy of his 2005 book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” [...] Read more »
A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).
In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg [...] Read more »
Readers of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” will doubtless remember (if you made it though to Chapter 12, *sigh*) the parallels I drew between physical architects (such as Antonio Averlino / Filarete, of course) and software/cipher architects: both achieve their design ends using a kind of “intellectual structuring” means. But might there be even closer links?
Concealment through architecture is [...] Read more »
…or, in all its prolixitous glory, ”The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World’s Greatest Cryptographers“, by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as “Can You Crack the Enigma Code?” in 2006.
You’d have thought I’d be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the [...] Read more »
