Cipher Mysteries

Just so you know, I'll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants' exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted ...

While musing on the Great Pyramid's four mysterious narrow shafts for my last cipher post, I was struck by an entirely different explanation for them. Since then, I've read through a whole load of web-pages (I know, I know) and haven't yet seen anything similar, so I thought I'd share the idea with you all, see where it leads. ...

A few weeks ago, some new ciphertexts pinged on my Cipher Mysteries radar: the story goes that they had been found just after WWII in wooden boxes concealed in the wall of an East London cellar that German bombing had exposed. Hence I've called them "The Blitz Ciphers", but they're probably much older than the 1940s... They were handed down to ...

Like many people, I've always vaguely wondered how the alchemical 'code' worked: that is, how the abstruse (and indeed playfully indirect) language of alchemy mapped onto actual things and processes in the real world. Even though the early 20th century saw a succession of natural philosophers and historically-minded empirical ...

Where, you may ask, does that annoying word "Xmas" come from? Is it just a linguistic marketing ploy to get a blunt message across in fewer letters? Well... yes, sort of. But perhaps not quite in the way you think... In English, we write "Christ", but his name was originally "Χριστος" ...

I've had it suggested that to entertain a popular audience, a Voynich Manuscript documentary should showcase a live reenactment of its naked ladies bathing in green muddy slime. In this film-making scenario, the cameras could linger longingly on their most interesting period features, which (I can only presume) means their hair and makeup. Doubtless it would look great in HD, etc. But where does ...

With 2012 - the centenary of Wilfrid Voynich's 1912 purchase of his subsequently-eponymous manuscript - inching ever closer, we will doubtless soon see a broad international wave of quick-turnaround documentary makers sniffing around its margins, snuffling for pungent historical truffles in the florilegial undergrowth of the Interweb. If, dear reader, that thumbnail profile just happens to describe you, then here's what you need: a ...

Last week  (3rd February 2011) saw the US premiere of "The Book That Can't Be Read", the long-awaited National Geographic channel airing of the recent ORF documentary on the Voynich Manuscript. Though it prominently features the benign beardiness of everyone's favourite Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen, for a pleasant change the star of the show is undoubtedly the manuscript itself, with the ...

For a while, I've had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn't work out how to scratch. You see... about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of ...

You may have heard the curious story from May 2008 about how Sotheby's withdrew a picture from auction that was suspected of having been optically captured by Thomas Wedgwood in the 1790s, some 30 years before the first 'official' photo was taken. Photography historian Dr Larry J. Schaaf speculated that this was so "based on the letter 'W' that – ...