Cipher Mysteries

Reading through the revised (2006) edition of David Hockney’s “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters“, I was a little surprised to come across (p. 235) a brief mention of the Voynich Manuscript.
In his section on “Secrecy” textual sources, Hockney quotes the introductory passage from William Romaine Newbold’s (1928) “The Cipher of Roger Bacon” where Newbold [...] Read more »

On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple - hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, [...] Read more »

Would having “Expert on the Voynich Manuscript” on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I’ll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don’t want you to find out…
Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich [...] Read more »

Another day, another curiously contentful blog to set me thinking: this time it’s Alterati, “The Inside Scoop on The Outside Culture”, and specifically a two-part article there from October 2007 entitled “The Yellow Sign: Manuscripts, Codices, and Grimoires“.
In Part 1, the discussion swoops from our old friend the Codex Seraphinianus (yet again), to Borges’ Tlön, [...] Read more »

When the Voynich Manuscript misdecipherer William Romaine Newbold died, his friend & colleague Roland Grubb Kent decided to bring all his late friend’s notes together into a book: this was published in 1928 by the University of Philadelphia Press under the title “The Cipher of Roger Bacon”. If you’d like your own copy, Kessinger sell [...] Read more »

I suppose it was glumly inevitable that the world’s favourite anti-reptilian ex-goalkeeper David Icke would have included the Voynich Manuscript in “The Biggest Secret” (1999), now freely downloadable from scribd.com. Which is nice.
Much as you’d expect, many of the strands of the mainstream story get picked out and respun into a distinctly paranoia-flavoured fabric. For [...] Read more »

One thing I’ve noticed about people with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript is that they often have logophilia (a love of words), particularly manifesting itself as a passion for etymology (the histories [both real and imagined] coiled up inside words), for the consonance and dissonance of word and letter patterns, and for the child-like [...] Read more »

I recently stumbled upon an active Voynich researcher I’d never heard of: Angela Catalina Ghionea (note that, even though Internet Explorer throws up lots of warnings for her website, it’s basically OK), who is a teaching assistant and 3rd year PhD student in the History Department at Purdue University.
She’s “currently focused on the most mysterious [...] Read more »

I’ve often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich’s cipher manuscript mania/hype [...] Read more »

No, not the 2008 film (though that too has a crystal skull-based storyline): I’m talking about the 1995 book by Max McCoy, which Bantam have just (May 2008) reissued apropos of nothing (apart from perhaps trying to surf the wave of the film’s gigantic marketing spend?)
The Voynich Manuscript makes its appearance very early on (p.27, [...] Read more »