A huge thanks to the indefatigable Tony Gaffney who very kindly took the time recently to double-check my transcriptions (some of them derived from Augusto Buonafalce’s transcriptions) of Bellaso’s various challenge ciphers against the copies held in the British Library.
Of the twelve corrections he suggested, roughly half were typos on my part, while the remainder were places where I had transcribed punctuation-like marks (but which were instead simply marks added incidentally as part of the printing).
I’m reasonably sure that the (corrected) Bellaso cipher page here now holds a pretty close, multiply-eyeballed set of transcriptions: so what are you waiting for, go and crack them! 🙂
Hi Nick, I wanted to know if Tony ever got around to crack #5 on the list? Seems like he would want to 7 for 7?
John: as far as I know, Tony’s still stuck on 6/7. But he’s a smart guy, he’ll get there in the end… 🙂
Well, I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t do some work of my own on this, but I haven’t got very far (yet). All I noticed is that the 3rd word “BLCAXTM” could match “cifrate”, which is Italian for “encrypted” and then the start of the next word “HCFXFFC…” could be “balilla…” which means “table”.
Then again I find it hard to suppose that mono-alphabetic substitution is at work here when Tony still hasn’t solved this last one. However, it could be that the first four “words” are an instruction on how to solve the last part that has no word boundaries at all.
The key for the 6th text is HR-DIS:
HRABCEFGLM
DISNOPQTUX