Cipher Mysteries

It's not widely known that the US National Security Agency has a small section at Fort Meade devoted to the history of code-breaking: The Center for Cryptologic History. As well as making scans of a number of useful documents available on its website (most notably Mary D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma"), the CCH convenes its own history of cryptology ...

(1) A big hello to Rich SantaColoma as he emerges from the VMs "List Closet" into the bright(-ish) light of the blogosphere. His "New Atlantis Voynich Theory" blog sets out his basic stall - which is that, thanks to his "Nagging Sense of Newness" about the Voynich Manuscript, he harbours strong doubts that it is anywhere near as ...

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 ...

In a comment to a recent post on Alberti & Averlino, 'infinitii' asks what my recommendations would be for a Voynich Manuscript reading list... a deceptively hard question. Apart from the direct literature on the subject (Mary D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma", my "The Curse of the Voynich", and perhaps even Kennedy & Churchill's "The Voynich Manuscript"), probably the best first ...

Sometimes a passing comment can open up a brief window onto an otherwise lost world. A 2002 email I made to the VMs mailing list I stumbled upon earlier today brought to mind one such instance, and six years on I found myself wondering just what had been said, what had been going on in a very particular context. Let's start with ...

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 of hindsight, do I now make ...

Even though people often assert (rather lazily) that the Voynich Manuscript is the only artefact 'of its kind', this is false, because there are plenty of similar documents. For the most part, the significant difference is merely one of scale, not of type - for example, the similar enciphered Quattrocento documents that do exist are neither as well-encrypted nor as large ...

Having just bought a print-on-demand copy of John Wilkins' book "Mathematical Magick: Or The Wonders That may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry", I found that it was (mostly) placed online in 2006 as part of "The Mathematical and Philosophical Works of the Right Rev. John Wilkins", (re-)published in 1802 - there's a free version on Google Books, available ...

I've been debating giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript at Treadwell's, but I keep coming back to the same problem - what angle should I take? For me, while its content is occulted ("hidden"), it's not really an occult object per se. (Well, apart from the magic circles, and they were pretty mainstream natural magic circa 1450). And it's neither ...

A couple of emails just in from Voynich novelists: it's so much nicer to hear about stuff before it happens, rather than haphazardly 6+ months later (sadly the de facto standard for the Internet). Firstly, Richard Douglas Weber writes to tell me that his Voynich novel is now very well advanced, and that (though I'm exaggerating a tad) it has a ...