Cipher Mysteries

I remember when I first saw the "Roger Bacon Manuscript": Wilfrid Voynich brought it with him to Philadelphia for his lecture back in 1921 - my old friend Bill Newbold was there, taking in every word, nodding like the crazy-but-brilliant spiritualist and Antioch-obsessed nutter he was. So it just had to be Bacon behind it all, right? I sat at the ...

Here's today's gratuitous Voynich limerick (stop me if you've heard it before):- A microscope gives you a two-fold Clue to the secrets of true gold You need it to write Baconian sh!te And you need it to read it like Newbold Rather less meaningfully, here's a Voynich-related "asemic" (defined as 'having no specific semantic content', so make of it what you will, quite literally) ...

Much as I enjoyed watching Micky Bet covering the Voynich Manuscript, I couldn't help but wonder how much better it would be had it had a slightly funkier script. So (courtesy of the kind people at Overstream) I added my own captions. Enjoy! :-) (If you can't see this in your browser or email client, here's a ...

Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things ...

As a brief follow-up to yesterday's post on Edith Rickert, I wondered whether her papers might be in the University of Chicago archives - and indeed here they are. For any Voynich researcher who just happens to be passing by, you might consider looking through Box 1 Folder 8 (for correspondence) and Box 10 Folder 13 (for photographs of her family ...

An off-blog email exchange about the Grolier Club (where Wilfrid Voynich's estate bequeathed eight boxes of papers relating to his book business in America) nudged my memory about a minor player on the 20th century Voynich stage... When Voynich researcher Richard SantaColoma visited the Grolier Club back in May 2008, he trawled through these boxes (Box 6 in particular) for anything unexpected: ...

Has Robert Teague found a sensational astronomical 'crib' into the Voynich Manuscript's ciphertext? Several Voynicheros have asked me to have a look at his claim: normally, this is researcher code for "I think it's nonsense but I'd like someone else to say it rather than me, because I quite like the guy", but let's see what he has ...

Given the amount of time cipher mystery researchers spend banging their heads against the limits of knowledge (read: brick walls), the fact that these mysteries sometimes invade their dreams should be no great shock. Here's a fine recent example of a Voynich dream from an anonymous correspondent (and no, it's not me being coy):- "I received in the post a 3-inch-thick wodge of ...

A new day brings a new Google Adwords campaign from Edith Sherwood (Edith, please just email me instead, it'll get the word out far quicker), though this time not promoting another angle on her Leonardo-made-the-Voynich-Manuscript hypothesis... but rather a transposition cipher Voynichese hypothesis. Specifically, she proposes that the Voynich Manuscript may ...

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 asserts that during the years ...