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 ...

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 ...

In "The Lost Symbol", Dan Brown takes his "symbologist" non-hero Robert Langdon on a high-speed twelve-hour tour around Washington. Broadly speaking, it's like riding pillion on a jetbike driven by a demented architectural historian screaming conspiratorial travelogue descriptions into your ears via a radio-mike. But you probably guessed that already. :-) In fact, because you all thought your other questions exactly ...

Apparently, Chapter 41 of "The Lost Symbol" namechecks a handful of cipher mysteries, which probably explains the Dorabella Cipher search query spike I noticed over the last few days. So, a minor mystery solved (for a change), I'd guess:- "...after [Langdon's] experiences in Rome and Paris, he’d received a steady flow of requests asking for his help deciphering some of ...

In the last two days, Cipher Mysteries has had a spate of (mainly American) visitors looking for things related to the Dorabella Cipher, so perhaps a TV documentary on Elgar has just aired there? Please leave a comment if you happen to know what triggered this mini-wave, I'd be interested to know! Anyway, it would seem to be time to discuss a recently-proposed ...

In the 1564 printed edition of his cryptography manual, Giovan Battista Bellaso included seven challenge ciphers for his readers to break, along with a set of clues: these all remained unbroken and in obscurity until Augusto Buonafalce wrote about them in 1997, 1999, and 2006 in the journal Cryptologia. But that's all changed now! Tony Gaffney - who Cipher Mysteries regulars should remember from his ...

Spurred on by a blog comment left this morning, I wondered whether the Dorabella cipher might actually (because of the symmetry of its cipherbet shapes) be some kind of rotating pigpen cipher, where you rotate each of the positions around after each letter. This would be a bit like a "poor man's Alberti cipher disk"... just ...

Spurred on by a blog comment left here earlier today by musician / piano teacher (and Elgar buff, no doubt) Liz May, who very kindly noted that... Dora Penny's favourite song at the time of the Dorabella Code in 1897 would possibly have been "Lullaby" from the six choral songs by Elgar, entitled "From the Bavarian Highlands" (1896).  [...] Dora ...

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 ...