Cipher Mysteries

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 ...

If you haven't seen Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus before, I heartily recommend stomping over to this 230-photo Flickr set and checking it out. It's now reasonably well-known that the book's strange page-numbering system has been cracked (it's a funny kind of base-21 counting, with various unlucky numbers removed), but the text itself remains enigmatic. Ivan Derzhanski has posted some ...

You may not have heard of them, but the six books in The Spiderwick Chronicles - stories that follow a group of kids in their everyday struggles with elves, goblins and boggarts - have (according to a piece in this week's MCV, which seemed to have been written by Vivendi's PR folk) sold six million copies worldwide, more than ...