Just a quick reminder that the next Voynich pub meet is set for 4pm this very Sunday (i.e. 5th September 2010) at the Prospect of Whitby, 57 Wapping Wall, London E1W 3SH. Though plenty of Voynicheros are hoping to come along, as always we’ll just have to see who manages to get there on the day…

Incidentally, if for some random reason – you know, pub cat trapped beneath an unexploded WWII bomb, that kind of thing – the Prospect of Whitby turns out to be closed when we get there, Plan B is to meet up at the nearby Town of Ramsgate pub (also on the Thames), while Plan C is Captain Kidd‘s (also on the Thames, but not as historical as Plans A & B).

Chances are Plan A should be fine, but I thought I’d mention the others just in case. Hope to see you there! 🙂

I hack, you hack, he/she hacks, we hack, they hack – whether you’re tying something to your key-ring with string, or trying “Username=admin / Password=admin“, you’re officially a hacker. Furthermore, says well-known YCombinator startup guy Paul Graham, the word “hack”…

…can be either a compliment or an insult. It’s called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that’s also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.

Believe it or not, the two senses of “hack” are also connected. Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. And there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that’s merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).

An ugly-to-beautiful rule-breaking continuum, eh? Further on in the post, Graham muses about what was wrong with living in Florence…

But after I’d been there a few months I realized that what I’d been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I’d just left. The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. (So I went back to America.)

Put all these pieces together, and do you grasp what Graham is feeling his way towards? That the Renaissance started with wave after wave of Florentine hardware hackers (Brunelleschi et al) and software hackers (Alberti et al), using their restless ingenuity to bypass & sidestep the rigid rules and conventions holding wobbly medieval practices & thought in place. But, irritatingly, this was not done under an elegantly humanist banner: no, this was a grass-roots, geeky, reality-hacking startup crew (let’s call them ‘Generation R‘, for want of a better name), all vying for Series A-style funding from the Venture Capitalists of the day (Medici, Sforza, Rucellai, Malatesta, etc), where the ‘exit strategy’ on their proposals wasn’t an IPO, but something much greater: fama – eternal individual fame.

It’s true that it’s a looong time since Burckhardt’s progressivist ra-ra-Renaissance-in-Florence line has been the dominant historical narrative for the Quattrocento; and yes, the Middle Ages also saw plenty of invention (see Jean Gimpel’s “The Medieval Machine” if you don’t believe me); but all the same, I suspect there would be more than a Tower grain of truth in the idea that the history of hacking can indeed be traced back through time right to Generation R’s door. Even if you don’t buy in to the rest of the simile. 😉

Putting our cipher mystery hat back on, does this mean that our favourite early modern cipher object – the Voynich Manuscript, of course – might merely be the ultimate software hack of its era? If so, is it an ugly (yellow duckling) hack of temporary convenience and cunning, or a beautiful (black swan) hack born of unique happenstance and intellect? Or might it instead sit somewhere in the foggy continuum between these two poles? Something to bear in mind, anyway…

Many historians and palaeographers have concluded that the interleaved ‘+’ signs added to the Voynich Manuscript’s back page indicate that the containing text is some kind of spell, incantation, chant, charm, curse, pious utterance, etc. Well, it’s completely true that ‘+’ was used in all of the preceding forms to indicate that the (non-silent) reader should physically trace out the sign of the cross at the same time, so this would seem a perfectly reasonable suggestion (if perhaps a little non-specific).

Here I’m particularly interested in the (apparently heavily emended) third line of text on f116v, where I have strongly enhanced the image to make the tangled textual mess I think this has ended up in clear. Note that (as I have discussed several times elsewhere, e.g.here) this line of text seems to end “ahia maria“, which I think pretty much confirms that the ‘+’ shapes are indeed crosses.

So, do we have any idea what the first part of the line originally said? It is certainly striking that all four words at the start of the line seem to end with the letter ‘x’, which gives the overall impression of some kind of magical chant. But what might that chant be?

This is where I wheel in Benedek Lang’s fascinating “Unlocked Books” (2008), which focuses on medieval magical manuscripts from Central Europe (and which you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I’m currently reading). As part of his discussion (p.65) of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (Maximianus, Martinianus, Malchus, Constantinus, Dionisius, Serapion & Johannes, since you’re asking) who were walled up for two hundred years but magically awoke during the reigh of Theodosius, Lang mentions a 14th century Czech amulet with the seven sleepers’ names as well as the text “pax + nax vax“, all used as a healing magic charm against fever.

Incidentally, I should note that “hax pax max adimax” is another piece of nonsense Latin that (for example) appears in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, and which some wobbly etymological sources give as the possible origin of the phrase “hocus pocus” (though I have to say I’d probably tend more towards the idea that it’s a corruption of [the genuine Latin] “hoc est corpus). But regardless, I don’t think “hax pax max” is what we’re looking at here.

pax nax vax“, then, is basically the right kind of phrase, with the right kind of structure, from the right kind of period. I’m not saying it’s definitely 100% right (history is rarely that simple): but even if it’s wrong, it may well turn out to be a very revealing attempt at an answer.

All in all, I’m really rather intrigued by the possibility that this line originally read (or read something remarkably close to) “six + pax + nax + vax + ahia + mar+ia +“: it’s just a shame that the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library doesn’t have finer wavelength (i.e. multispectral) scans of this contentious feature so that we could test this kind of hypothesis out. One day, though…

Do you sometimes find rationality soooo boring? Well, I think I might just have the perfect Voynich theory to fit your fickle mood: & it runs like this…

“After destroying Atlantis, the alien Sauron changed his name to Jehovah […] His most recent appearance was in Berlin where Adolf Hitler was brain washed into thinking he could conquer the world. Sauron knew that the true king would be returning to earth and that he would be born from among the Jews in Eastern Europe. Now we know the real reason behind ‘the Holocaust’.”

“After the Nazi’s were defeated, Sauron the Dark Lord ( in the gold box known as the Ark of the Covenant ) escaped to South America and from there to North America and into a building which was specifically built for him. That building is called ‘the Pentagon’ …. and that is where he is in hiding as we speak.”

At first glance, you’d think we’re doomed, for our life on Earth is literally passing time in Sauron’s Hell. But wait, we have one tiny chance for redemption…

“The people of Atlantis were defeated and their continent was sunk. Some survived and passed one thing down to us, an account of their story. This is the book known to legend as ‘The Holy Grail.’ One copy of that book is the ‘Voynich Manuscript.'”

“The holy grail provides the instructions for constructing a weapon …. to kill Satan.”

Apparently Tolkien [“a member of the Illuminati“] knew all this, and constructed “The Lord of the Rings” as nothing less then “a TRUE version of history“. So now, if anybody asks you why you’re trying to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, you can say: “I’m fighting against Satan, f&*^wad“. Very reassuring! 🙂

Though the Voynich Manuscript has many unusual and interesting sections, arguably the most boring of the lot is Quire 20 (‘Q20’). This comprises a thick-ish set of six text-only bifolios (though with a central bifolio missing), where just about every paragraph has a tiny drawing of a star/flower/comet shape attached to it.

Tally all these up, and you find that Q20 as it now is has between 345 and 347 stars (two are slightly questionable). This is intriguingly close enough to the magic number 365 for some researchers to have speculated that this section might actually be an almanack, i.e. a one-paragraph-per-day-of-the-year guide. It is also close enough to the similarly resonant number 360 for some (and, indeed, often the same) people to speculate whether the section might be a kind of per-degree astrology, i.e. a one-paragraph-per-degree judicial astrological reference. If neither, then the general consensus seems to be that Q20 is some kind of secret recipe / spell collection (there were plenty of these in the Middle Ages).

Yet the problem with constructing an explanation around 365 stars, as Elmar Vogt pointed out in a 2009 blog post, is that Q20 ticks over fairly consistently at about 15 paragraphs/stars per page, and we have four pages missing from the centre: hence we would expect the grand total to be somewhere closer to 345 + (15 x 4) = 405, which is far too many. Of course, the same observation holds true for 360 per-degree paragraphs too.

You could try – as Elmar subsequently did – to start from a count of 365 (or indeed from 360) and hold that as a constraint to generate plausible codicological starting points (i.e. by answering the question “what kind of ordering could be constructed that would be consistent with 360 or 365 starred paragraphs?”). However, you quickly run into the problem that the marginalia-filled f116v looks very much as if it was originally (as it now is) the final page of the quire, which (in my opinion) is also supported by the large, final, unstarred paragraph on f116r, [which, incidentally, I predict will turn out to hold the most informative plaintext of the whole book, i.e. stuff about the author]. And if you accept that f116 was indeed probably originally the end folio, then you run into a bit of a brick wall as far as possible shufflings of Q20 go.

All the same, here’s an interesting new angle to consider. Cipher Mysteries reader Tim Tattrie very kindly left a comment here a few days ago, pointing out that the rare EVA letter ‘x’ appears in 19 folios – “46r, 55r, 57v, 66r, 85r, 86v6, 94r, 104r, 105r, 105v, 106v, 107v [NP: actually 107r], 108r, 108v, 111r, 112r [NP: ?], 113v, 114v, 115v” – which he wondered might suggest a possible thematic link between Q8, Q14 (the nine-rosette fold-out) and Q20. However, what particularly struck me about this list of pages was that (remembering that f109 and f110 form Q20’s missing central bifolio) every folio in Q20 has an ‘x’ except for the first folio (f103) and the last folio (f116), which are of course part of the same bifolio.

Could it be that the f103-f116 bifolio was originally separate from the rest of the Q20 bifolios? Even though f116v looks as though it really ought to be the back page of the quire, I have always found f103r a very unconvincing first page for a quire – with no introduction, no title, no ornate scribal scene-setting, to my eyes it seems more like a mid-quire page, which is a bit of a puzzle. In fact, of all the Q20 starred paragraph pages I’d have thought the strongest candidate for quire-initial page would be f105r, courtesy of its overelaborate split (and dotted, and starred) gallows, as per the below image. Just so you know, f105r also contains two of Q20’s four ‘titles’ (an offset piece of Voynichese text), one on line 10 and one on its bottom line, the latter of which crypto crib-fans may well be pleased to hear that I suspect contains the title of the chapter – “otaiir.chedaiin.otair.otaly” (note that the two other Q20 titles are to be found on f108v and f114r).

Interestingly, Tim Tattrie then pointed out that “f103 and 116 are linked as they are the only folios in Q20 that do not have tails on the stars“: which (together with the absence of ‘x’s) suggests that they were originally joined together, i.e. as the central bifolio of a quire. All of which suggests that the original layout of Q20 may have been radically different layout, with the f105/f114 bifolio on the outside of (let’s call it) ‘Q20a’ and the f103/f116 bifolio on the outside of ‘Q20b’, and all the other Q20 bifolios in the middle of Q20a.

Picking up where Elmar left off before, this is where almanack (365-star) and per-degree (360-star) proponents would somewhat enthusiastically ask how many stars this proposed Q20a gathering would have originally had. Because f103 has 35 stars, and f116 has 11 stars, Q20a has (say) 299 stars across five bifolios. Add in the missing f109/f110 bifolio, and the answer is terrifically simple: extrapolating from Q20a’s stars-per-paragraph figure, we’d expect the original quire to have had (299 * 6 / 5) = 359 stars – hence the likelihood is that Q20a contained some kind of per-degree zodiac reference, most probably along the lines of Pietro d’Abano’s per-degree astrology.

Having said that… the figures are extremely tight, and if the missing bifolio instead mimicked the f108/f111 bifolio (which, after all, it ended up physically next to in the final binding) rather than the overall section average (which may also be slightly lowered by the 11-per-page average of f105), it would have closer to 72 stars rather than 60, which would then bring the 365-star almanack hypothesis back into the frame. It’s a tricky old business this, nearly enough to drive a poor codicologist to drink (please excuse my shaking white cotton gloves, etc).

There are various other observations that might help us reconstruct what was going on with Q20a/Q20b:-

  • Helpfully, Elmar documented the various empty/full star patterns on the various Q20 pages, and noted that most of them are no more than empty-full-empty-full-empty-full sequences, with the exception of “f103r, f104r and f108r”, which he interprets as implying that they were probably originally placed together.
  • f105v is very much more faded than all the other pages in Q20, which I have wondered might have been the result of weathering: if f105 had been the outer folio of an unbound Q20a, then it could very well have ended up being folded around the back of Q20b by mistake for a while early in the life of the Q20 pages, which would have put it on the back page of the whole manuscript.
  • I still believe that the gap in the text in the outside edge of f112 was no more than a vellum fault (probably a long vertical rip) in the page in the original (unenciphered) document from which Q20a was copied, but that’s probably not material to any bifolio nesting discussion.
  • The tail-less paragraph stars on f103r seem slightly ad hoc to my eyes: I suspect that they were added in after the event.
  • The notion that Q20 originally contained seven nested quires (as per the folio numbering) seems slightly over-the-top to me: this seems a bit too much for a single mid-15th century binding to comfortably take.

What are we to make of all this fairly raw stream of codicological stuff? Personally, I’m fairly sold on the idea that Q20 was originally formed of two distinct gatherings, with f105r the first page of the first gathering (Q20a) and f116v the last page of the last gathering (Q20b). Placing all the remaining bifolios in Q20a to get close to the magic numbers of 360 and 365 is a hugely seductive idea: however, such numerological arguments often seem massively convincing for a short period of time, before you kind of “sober up” to their limitations, so I think it’s probably safer to note the suggestion down as a neat explanation (but to return to it later when we have amassed more critical codicological information about the Q20 pages).

Perhaps the thing to do now is to look at other features (such as handwriting, rare symbols, letter patterns, contact transfers, etc) for extra dimensions of grouping / nesting information within the Q20 pages, and to look for more ways of testing out this proposed Q20a/Q20b split. Sorry not to be able to come to a definitive conclusion on all this in a single post, but with a bit of luck this should be a good starting point for further discussion on what Q20 originally looked like. Tim, Elmar, John, Glen (and anyone else), what do you think? 🙂

Update: having posted all the above, I went off and had a look at all the ‘x’ instances in Q20 – these seem to have a strong affinity for sitting next to ‘ar’ and ‘or’ pairs, e.g. arxor / salxor / kedarxy / oxorshey / oxar / shoxar / lxorxoiin, etc.

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:-

  1. (–Top secret, yet to be announced–)
  2. The Voynich Manuscript
  3. The Anthon Transcript
  4. The Beale Papers
  5. The Rohonc Codex
  6. The HMAS Sydney Ciphers
  7. The Tamam Shud Cipher
  8. The D’Agapeyeff Cipher
  9. The Codex Seraphinianus
  10. The Dorabella Cipher
  11. The Phaistos Disk

Note that the HMAS Sydney Ciphers part isn’t yet live, because I haven’t written the post yet (probably later this week). 🙂  I may update the list later to insert the Vinland Map at #7, but that’s another story entirely…

Incidentally, the reason I ranked the Voynich Manuscript at #2 is because the top spot will be filled (hopefully fairly soon) with an awesome centuries-old cipher mystery I’ve been chipping away at for a while, one that will be eerily familiar to many CM readers. Don’t hold your breath, but I do think you’re going to like it a lot… 🙂

I’ve waited a decade to find anything good on the Rohonc Codex (and don’t get me started on Wikipedia yet again), so it is with great delight that I read Benedek Lang’s April 2010 Cryptologia article “Why Don’t We Decipher an Outdated Cipher System? The Codex of Rohonc” that he kindly mentioned in a comment on this site a few days ago.

Despite the slightly clunky title, I think it is fair to say that Lang’s piece utterly replaces pretty much all the previous writing on the subject, and arguably moves the Rohonc Codex very nearly on a par with the Voynich Manuscript. Really, it is almost unnerving to find out that the RC suffers from precisely the same issues bedevilling VMs research:

  • wide possible date range (1530s [from the Venetian paper] to 1838 [when it was donated by Count Gusztáv Batthyány])
  • uncertain provenance (one possible mention in a 1743 inventory, but that’s it)
  • inability to narrow down the plaintext language (Old Hungarian? Latin? or what?)
  • apparently unhelpful drawings (probably representing a life of Christ, but offering very few cribs)
  • non-trivial cipher nomenclator / shorthand combination (in my opinion)
  • dominant hoax narrative (but which is at odds with the early dating of the support medium)
  • unsubstantiated links to murky historical figures (forger Sámuel Literáti Nemes rather than Dee & Kelley)
  • inadequate codicological and palaeographical analyses (by modern standards)
  • multiple hands contributing to the object’s construction (two in the case of the RC, it would appear)

To me, the RC and the VMs (and their complicated mad ecologies of attempted decryptions) seem like two expressions of the same underlying historical pathology – when the aspirational desire to reconstruct the what overwhelms the grounding need to look for the how. Hence I asked Benedek Lang the same kind of “Voynich 2.0” questions I try (in vain) to start from these days, to round out the parts of his article that are less obviously cryptological (yet still important). Here are his responses (very lightly edited)…

* * * * * * *

[NP] (1) Has anyone done a codicological analysis of the Rohonc Codex? That is, how confident should we be that the bifolios remain in their original gatherings/quires and nesting order and that no bifolios have been lost, and when was the cover added, etc? Are there any signs of multiple rebindings? Are there any fingerprints?

[BL] No fingerprints, but basically anyone can touch it in the library, and some people in the 19th century even made notes in it. There had been a little research regarding the watermark, which I largely confirmed with my own research, though this however says nothing about the writing itself (which might of course be a later addition). The beginning and the end of the book are quite destroyed, to the point that the first and last 20 pages are no longer bound into the book, hence their (19th century) numbering might well be wrong. I think the book is in its original binding, which is not a real binding, just a piece of leather.

(2) Has there been a systematic study of any apparent corrections by the author(s)? For example, I notice a line apparently crossed out in Figure 5, or is that just boxed for emphasis?

No, nothing. My impression is that the corrections do not say anything that makes sense to me, but I should perhaps pay more attention to this.

(3) Has there been a palaeographic study of the text itself? For example, might it have (Leonardo-style) been written right-to-left for convenience by a left-hander? And have the palaeographic differences between the hands been described carefully? For example, did all the hands form the letters in the same way?

No, nothing, although it would be good to know whether there really are two hands – as it appears to me – and whether the text was written by one left handed person (or two), or just in the other direction by a right handed person.

(4) Has there been a palaeographic study of the marginalia and (what appear to be) interlinear notes? As with the VMs’ 15th century quire numbers and marginalia, dating the folio numbers might give a far more limiting (if pragmatic) terminus ante quem – really, there ought to be _some_ internal evidence that can help improve on 1838, which in historical terms is practically yesterday.

These marginalia were made by one of the less clever late 19th century “scholars” who believed that they were able to decipher the text.

(5) Apart from the introduction of new symbols, are there any signs of evolution or development of the core writing system through the 450 pages? As new symbols are added, are they progressively more ornate (which would argue for them being improvised, rather than as part of a pre-existing system)? Furthermore, are there any places where a new symbol is added in a left-right textual context which recurs around a word earlier in the document? (This would again argue for a nomenclator being improvised during the writing process).

There are certainly some occasional changes – for example, one of the symbols (the winged one) becomes less ornate – but apart from this I do not see any systematic changes. It is also true that new signs are introduced when there is a new person in the text (Pilate, for example). But I have not done serious research into that question.

(6) Did the Battyhany family ever compile inventories of their library? Has anyone looked for provenance in this kind of way?

Yes! There are several partial inventories of this very large library, and some earlier Rohonc Codex scholars thought that a book entitled “Hungarian prayers” in a 18th century inventory referred to this book. However, I remain skeptical, for I would be more satisfied by an inventory entry along the lines of “a book with unknown signs”. Such a description, however, is absent from the catalogues, the last one of which is dated exactly 100 years before 1838, when the codex first appeared.

As a general comment, I’d say that the lacuna in your account of shorthand is between Tironian notae and Bright’s Characterie. In Italy, Quattrocento scribes built up local traditions of abbreviations, with “underbars” and (macron-like) “overbars” for contraction and abbreviation (there are even some of these in Alberti’s facade for Santa Maria Novella). Isaac Pitman’s history of shorthand also mentions (p.6) a (probably 16th century) “Mr Radcliff, of Plymouth” whose version of the Lord’s Prayer – “Our Fth wch rt n hvn : hlwd b y Nm” – looks rather like modern SMS txtspk! What links many of these, then, is that they were ugly systems of abbreviation mainly intended to capture charismatic sermons as they were spoken: and so Bright’s innovation was to make the strokes easy to write, rather like Greek tachygraphy (which, though it was used in antiquity and in the Byzantine Empire, never seems to have crossed over into Europe).

Thanks! I was not aware of that.

In this context, then, the Rohonc Codex’s awkwardly angular letter forms seem to me quite independent of the many post-Bright shorthands: and also seem to have nothing structurally corresponding to the characteristic underbars or overbars of Quattrocento scribal practice. Hence to my eyes, it seems unlikely to fall within any known shorthand tradition, save that of pure abbreviation / contraction.

Yes, I agree.

As with the Voynich, I think the most likely scenario for the Rohonc Codex is that it is formed of a combination of (specifically abbreviating  / contracting) shorthand and non-polyalphabetic cryptography (though it seems very likely that the VMs’ cryptographic aspect is many times more sophisticated than the Rohonc Codex’s): and it is this pairing when also combined with the lack of knowledge about the underlying language that makes it impractical to crack in a conventional way. In both cases, I suspect that the necessary first step will be to crack the history first!

Yes, but what can be done when almost nothing is known about its history? The Batthyány family might well have purchased it anywhere. In my mind, I imagine that it is a combination of a shorthand and a cipher, though lately however I am convinced that it is a consonant writing (due to a possible Turkish or Hebrew origin) and a cipher applied to that consonant language. (In fact, this is almost the same as saying that it is a cipher and a shorthand, because shorthands are usually composed of consonants.) I do not believe that it is a hoax because it is an ugly book, and I do not really know of any similar hoaxes from the pre-19th century period. I was, however, convinced that the Voynich Manuscript was itself a late 19th century hoax until I learned about its new dating. Hence I remain puzzled!

 PS: do you have a picture of yourself I could include in the post? Thanks!

Benedek Lang

* * * * * * *

So there you have it – the Rohonc Codex is very probably, as Lang’s piece implies, just as uncertain as the VMs. Yet where are the massed ranks of me-too US documentary-makers clamouring to go to Budapest to view it? Why can’t we hear William Shatner’s voiceover ringing in our ears? 

To me, the central mystery of the Rohonc Codex is therefore why its ‘ugly duckling’ cousin [the Voynich Manuscript] gets all the mad heresy theories when it’s the Rohonc Codex that has all the pictures of Christ. (Note to novelists & film companies: Budapest is much prettier than New Haven). Go figure!

OK, after the obligatory minor horse-trading, the next Voynich historical pub meet is now set for 4pm on Sunday 5th September 2010 at The Prospect of Whitby in Wapping. Philip Neal, Marke Fincher, and John Kozak are all on for this, and I hope to see several more of you other lovely Voynicheros appearing on the day as well.

Just so you know, the Prospect of Whitby sits high on most historical-London-pub lists because (a) it’s quite possibly the oldest London pub on the Thames, (b) 18th century smugglers and villains often met there (when it was called “The Devil’s Tavern”), (c) many of its fittings are made from reclaimed ships’ fittings, and most importantly (d) it opens on a Sunday. 🙂 There’s also a nice VideoJug video introduction to the pub here (though with a loud advert at the start). It’s a scant 10 minutes’ walk from the newly re-opened Wapping station, so if you put your postcode into the BeerInTheEvening page for the pub, it’ll pass you straight to the TfL journey planner (if not, remember that the Waterloo & City line doesn’t run on Sundays!) Note that Wapping also has the (just about as old) Town of Ramsgate, the Captain Kidd and the Grapes pubs just down the road, so has plenty of scope for that ancient British tradition, ye olde historicalle pubbe crawlle, shudde ye bee sadde ennoughe.

Incidentally, if I’ve read the Port of London Authority’s tide tables correctly, 5th September 2010 should see low tide at 17:00, which would be perfect for taking a beer down onto the shingle (rain permitting). So if you arrive late on a fine day and can’t see any huddled Voynicheros in the bar, upstairs, or the outside terrace, don’t forget to check beside the Thames too!

“Can you stop being so goddamn Voynich?” Dan shouted down the phone at her continued silence. “I’m sick of reading between your lines, playing guess-what-Marie-means like our whole off-line life is some afternoon quiz show. Since our shared New Haven hajj, you’ve been no fun – zero fun – and all I’m getting from you are stupid little clues that even the Cipher Mysteries guy wouldn’t be able to spin into a story. So… what’s the goddamn deal, Em?

Across the Skypey quiet, he could hear her breathing tighten, hear her holding her head in her head, even hear her throat quiver with the tension. And then: “Jeez, Danski,” she lurched, “I feel like… like… that whole Quire 13 thing.”

“What, floating in a pool that can’t decide whether it’s green or blue?”

“No, damnit, like… like I’ve been turned inside out and… had a second creation phase added… similar but distinctly different from the first phase.”

“Christ”, Dan choked, “that makes me…”

“Yes, second phase co-author. And the scans say… it’s going to be a girl. Our girl!”

When people suggest that the repetitions in the Voynich Manuscript might have arisen because of a delusional paranoid author, I do wonder if they have ever seen anything by angry, mad, disbarred lawyer Francis E. Dec Esquire? Here’s one of his staggering puppet communist Frankenstein computer gangster god rant letters performed by a voice actor courtesy of YouTube. Well worth watching right to the end, I’d say! 🙂

Really, could anyone square this kind of content with the calm, controlled, rational penmanship of the VMs? I don’t think so, sorry!