Cipher Mysteries

With my book publisher hat on, I'd guess that the pitch for this book probably said: "Codes! Ciphers! Cryptograms! Masonic stuff! For Dummies!" And yes, the authors (Denise Sutherland and Mark E. Koltko-Rivera) pretty much seem to have delivered on that basic promise. But... is it any good? Bear with me while I sketch out a triangle in idea-space. On the first vertex, I'll ...

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 ...

I'm getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google's hits are for ghastly sites listing "Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries" or "10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes". Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I'm not getting "Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips" and ...

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" (which he wrote under ...

...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 Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, ...