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 ...

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 ...

This being Cipher Mysteries, I try to read a fair bit of mysterious cipher-related stuff along the way, both non-fiction and fiction. Yet just as you'd expect, most cipher mystery fiction tends more to the 'airport novel' end of the spectrum than the 'lit-rit-cher' end. Which pleasantly brings to mind (well, to my mind, at least) Elvis Costello's "God's Comic" as ...

Here's something a bit unexpected: a teen novel built around school rivalries, DNA testing, the Voynich Manuscript and the Phaistos Disc. Due to come out in February 2010, could "That's Life, Samara Brooks" be the first properly crossover Voynich-themed book to add to the Cipher Mysteries Big Fat List? I'll be sure to get a copy along the ...

Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on "hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets", hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book "Decoding The Lost Symbol"... OK, I'm sure you've rumbled the secret already: that it's basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox's book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers ...

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 ...

The Voynich Manuscript belongs to an elite club of mysterious and as-yet-unread historical artefacts. But might this club be about to lose a member? An article in the July-August 2008 edition of the archaeology journal Minerva (as reported by the Times) declares that the Phaistos Disc may well be a hoax. Having already debunked a number of questionable artefacts ...

For a while, I've been wondering about what "the new Kahn" (i.e. what the updated, 2007 equivalent of David Kahn's "The Codebreakers") would be. On a whim, I recently bought a couple of plausible-looking cryptography history books, just in case one of them might be that book... "Codes, Ciphers, Secrets and Cryptic Communication" by Fred B. Wrixon is quite cool. In ...