Cipher Mysteries

Just a quick note to say that I've been working behind the scenes for a few weeks on a revised Cipher Mysteries home page, incorporating a nice clickable list of what I think are the top unsolved cipher mysteries of all time, some of which you may not have heard of:- (--Top secret, yet to be announced--) The Voynich Manuscript The Anthon Transcript The Beale Papers The Rohonc ...

A few days back, two small book-shaped things arrived in the post: and I've been pondering what to say about them ever since. In fact, I've been struggling to work out what I think about them... you'll see what I mean in a moment. You might superficially compare them with, for example, Luigi Serafini's famously unreadable book: however, I have relatively ...

As part of this year's week-long typography event at Lurs (August 2009), long-time Voynichologist François Almaleh will be giving a talk on "Le manuscrit Voynich" - but ignore the typo on the page which makes it look as if his session is something to do with HELMO (which is actually the joint name of two French graphic artists - here's a ...

Too much typing yesterday, hence this ultra-brief post. :-) If (like me) you're fascinated by the Codex Seraphinianus, I think you really, really need to read the article "THE CODEX SERAPHINIANUS - How Mysterious Is A Mysterious Text If The Author Is Still Alive (And Emailing)?" by Justin Taylor from the May 2007 edition of The Believer magazine. Taylor even includes ...

According to Pittsburgh-based Chilean artist Alberto Almarza's blog profile, he "meticulously blurs the boundaries between consensus and potential reality, creating a bridge between the realm of matter and that of inner vision." All of which rather reminds me of the Jim Morrison quote: "There are things known and things unknown and in between are The Doors". Anyhoo, given Almarza's interests and self-proclaimed liminality, it ...

Here's the nice little video for David Byrne's (2008) song "The People Tree". It mashes up 1920s collage stylings (such as cloche hats) with a man in a black mask being interviewed while holding a mysterious book. Lots of Voynich-like bits (plants and trees, nymph-like people), but with a bit of a Codex Seraphinianus edge to it. Sure, I'm too big a ...

...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, ...

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, Uqbar, Orbis ...

I try to pick up on everything VMs-related out there, and I liked comics as a kid (Marvel not DC, if you're askin'): so it came as a nice surprise to find the Voynich Manuscript popping up on the edges of the comics world. According to this page on his own website, satirical graphics novel author Steve Aylett placed ...

While reading up on the John Titor phenomenon (which Benjamin Kerstein based his Josef6 novel upon), I came across some other great modern hoaxes / self-deceptive phenomena I hadn't previously been aware of. I decided to briefly explore these, in case I could find parallels I could find with the Voynich Manuscript (thanks to Gordon Rugg, the notion of a ...