I’ve been busy up in the loft, having a somewhat-overdue tidying session there. But rather than give a load of books to the charity shop (my default response), I wondered if any of my Cipher Mysteries readers would like to have some?
Voynich Novels
As you may know, I maintained my big fat list of Voynich-themed novels up until about 2012, at which point I’d really had enough of reading them for one lifetime (and so basically threw in the towel).
Hence it should be no surprise that I have a ten-book-high pile of novels mentioning the Voynich Manuscript (to greater or lesser degrees) to give away, many of which I have reviewed here (e.g. Scarlett Thomas’ “PopCo”, Brad Kelln’s “In Tongues of the Dead”, A.W. Hill’s “Enoch’s Portal”, Steve Berry’s “The Charlemagne Pursuit”, Christopher Harris’ “Mappamundi”, and Brett King’s “The Radix”), as well as a fair few others:
So, if anyone in the UK reading would like their very own instant Voynich-themed novel shelf, please let me know in the comments section below, and I’ll send the whole darn pile to whomsoever I think most oddly worthy. Paypal-ing something towards the postage would be a kind gesture, but the whole point of this exercise is to make space rather than money. 🙂
Oh, and if anyone would like to submit reviews of other Voynich-themed novels to be published on Cipher Mysteries, I’d be more than happy to post them up. Just don’t ask me to read the actual book, nothankyou. 😉
Historical Cipher-Themed Novels
I also have a chunky little box of nineteen historical cipher-themed novels to give away, where it’s more sensible to talk about weight (6.9kg) than the total page count:
(Strictly speaking, James Cowan’s “A Mapmaker’s Dream” isn’t quite in the pacy-cipher-airport-novella genre that most of the rest is, but it’s in the box regardless.)
So again, if anyone in the UK reading would like a whole bunch of historical cipher novels, please let me know in the comments section below, and I’ll send the whole box-load to some deserving soul or other. I don’t really have the patience to package up individual books, so it’s an all-or-nothing kind of thing, I’m afraid.
Cheers!
If you have factual books I could well be interested in some of them. When it comes to Voynich fiction I have already been exposed to plenty of it from the likes of Gerard Cheshire etc.
Thanks!
Mark Knowles: there is something of a lack of Voynich factual books, probably caused by the general lack of Voynich facts. :-/
Of course, I have some ideas to fix that, but I’ll leave that for a separate post… 😉
Nick Pelling: are you suggesting that James Cowan our questionable chemical analist was a cartologist to boot. If so his Map Makers Dream (tongue in cheek?) credentials would need careful vetting for accuracy.
Nick,
Off-topic but I don’t know where else to ask this. It’s just a question, not a theory.
You’ve spoken of verbose ciphers. I’ve recently had reason to post an image of Egyptian-style numerals with Syriac letters. What I would like to know is if there’s a particular point at which a mixed text of any sort would, if the component glyphs and/or type of text were unidentified, create a wrong result for statistical linguistic analyses.
For example – if you fed in pages from an Atlas’ index, where the place-names are in English but the Lat.long. descriptions aren’t exactly English, would linguistic analysis produce a graph identifying the text as English? What about if the place-names were transcribed in their local languages? If the text were fed in without paragraph breaks to make a continuous text and non-standard forms for the numerals were used – how do you think that would appear on a comparative probability for languages sort of graph?
It’s not a theory. I’m just curious about where such programs might reach their tipping point.
I’ve always had a faint dream of feeding in a few pages of knitting patterns or astronomical tables to see how the language-identification programs might cope.
Forgive if the question is foolish = an answer is impossible.
Nick, great list of Voynich books. Not knowing any of them I will take your word for it they that is what they are. I am intersted in collecting Voynich books though more just plain theories as to what people think it is. How many total theories are there? Goodness knows.
It could be one will jump out and be hard to argue with soon. How soon? I dont know. I think we might be back with people thinking you know “any day now”. That was thought in the past though.
I would offer to take them off your hands, though you said UK only, and I am US.
These things guys when you get old and grey do tend to collect, and running out of space is a real problem, that I personally have.
Good luck on finding your Pereisc papers Nick, if thats what the good Lord intends.
I don’t think theres any thing I could do to personally bring it about, from your description.
Diane: I guess there can be no simple answer to the question “how much can you mangle something before it ceases to be recognisable as itself?” However, in those situations where you can partition glyphs into groups, you should be able to make a reasonable attempt at auto-discovering each of the groups.
Nick,
Thanks for the reply. I was wondering mostly whether results which conclude a text is no language at all should be taken as definite. You know how those programs work, so I bothered you with the question of what might lead to an false positive or negative. There would be no point in my working on the written text; so many highly experienced and competent people that I tend to read and marvel when it comes to translation, decryption and analysis.
But again, thanks.
Nick Pelling: Any takers yet? I can well understand why you’re clearing the loft of excess Voynich light reading literature. Of course Wilfrid’s own version would be considered undoubtedly more coveted for it’s elegance and pure novel theme no doubt. Perhaps Rich Santalacoma or even one of the sombre Ninja camp followers would pay freight to get their greedy hands on your excellent collection. Would you per chance have a copy of ‘The Booles and the Hintons’ by original VM author Gerry Kennedy, quite frankly I’m more interested in the big picture warts and all, not so much the Milanese coffee club cipher gossip that still seems all important to some.
@ Nick
I hope that the threads don’t get crossed here by Matt Reilly taking inspiration from our SM posts! We’ve certainly managed to cover a fair sweep of Australian social history via a flurry of keystrokes and the odd lean lead!
John Sanders,
“Milanese coffee club cipher gossip” – come on now, admit you didn’t coin that phrase. It has all the hallmarks of the Voynich meme: snide, meaningless, vague and offensive all in one.
Myself, I’d prefer the English style pub-meet and lots of technical talk.
Speaking of historical detail – coffee was first associated with small-minded gossip in the 17thC, and the German ‘kaffekatch’ still carries that connotation. In England, coffee-drinking was associated with dangerously new ideas in scholarship and politics.
Before the 17thC, in Italy at least, the local pharmacy was where people hung out for various health-drinks. Very like the American 1950s idea of the drug-store.
/or with with intellectual information-swapping (a bit like academia-edu).
Big-picture stuff is perfectly fine but one has to ask whether it can bear close examination. Like forgeries.
John,
I am not sure you have read them or not, The Gadfly should be on your list for sure, and I think absolutely The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad as well. The Secret Agent concerns the still unsolved bombing of the Greenwish Observatory’s motive in 1894 by Martial Bourdin, and other subsersive elements. Conrad is mentioned by Gerry Kennedy it the Boole book you mentioned as being very critical of The Gadfly. I have a *belief* they traveled in the same social circles, and were perhaps “Frenemies”. I need more clarity on that though. The Gadfly is a little bit of a slog, and if your religiously inclined, a no go zone. Stupid, weird propaganda if you ask me, though it does honestly have its moments. It does mention ciphers so “innocent” little Ethel knew about them.
If you are looking for a colloborator on a *modern* concoction of the VM: I do wonder about Alfred Jarry, and absurdist “pataphysics”. He seems from the little I know of him (pataphysics was mentioned in trenchant “Maxwells Silver Hammer” by the Beatles), someone who would have a laugh at the dilemmas of modern Voynichologists. He seems like a true loon to me, but I have been known to change my opinion.
For Jo, I am the Matt who has been commenting on SM recently. No connection wit h Matt Reilly, whoever that is. If you were wondering…
Helping to solve one perplexing and weird historic mystery at a time.
Matt Lewis: yes inderd I have read both and found them compelling. I’m reminded that Conrad also wrote ‘the end of the tether’ about the same time as ‘the secret agent’ and in it he discusses the idea of a trip to Adelaide where his daughter had taken up residence at Glenelg. Can’t recall if he ever made it over from his mean digs in Hong Kong. Cheers js
Nick, “in those situations where you can partition glyphs into groups”… do you have an example for a potential partitioning?
E.g., I think a partitioning conducted only by style aspects (gallows vs non-gallows etc.) isn’t really productive, but e. g. partitioning glyphs, which occur only in a particular position vs glyphs, which seem to be spread among the vords, is more useful. This would allow as a consequence to extract something like a “normal form” of a vord.
What was your thought about sensible partitioning glyphs into groups?
@ Matt – Matthew Reilly is a prolific Australian writer, I noticed one of his books on Nick’s Voynich shelf…
Dianne: sorry to disappoint but yes, all mine sweetheart and seems from your comment, well apportioned. This as opposed to your tired discourse on a long time disaffection with those at Ninja who don’t hold you in such high esteem for your preference (unstated) to Bizantine tea culture and snide accusations of intellectual plagiarism.
Mr. Sanders,
Diane has one ‘n’.
‘Byzantine tea culture’ – indeed?
The Voynich arena you mention shows it listing 1,824 persons as members – none of whom I’ve met and all of whom I would have supposed brought together by nothing but common interest in one medieval manuscript yet your
use of the term ‘disaffected’ suggests something else. The word’s definition involves such ideas as ‘disloyalty’ and ‘rebellion’ – as if those 1.824 persons I’ve never met suppose themselves united by some particular ideology of the political or religious sort. People speak of ‘disaffected’ members of a church, or of a political party and so on. It suggests something traitorous – which is an extraordinarily odd idea in this context. Equally odd, if the subject is a medieval manuscript’s study, is the implication that uniformity of thought and unanimity of opinion is either demanded or imagined desirable.
If I have a position from which I simply cannot recede, it is that the Voynich manuscript occupies the same world, and the same plane of reality as every other extant fifteenth century manuscript, and that those who contribute time and effort to its study should maintain the same standards with regard to ethics and documentation as is normal in any other branch of medieval studies.
Scholars do not address each other as ‘sweeheart’ as a means to side-step the fact that they have no real contribution to offer, but still wish to suggest they have some right to suggest that women are less intelligent.
Scholars do not speak of ‘disaffection’ from some imagined party-platform to which all are expected to agree, but rather of debate and of differing opinions.
To take and re-use the matter (including an argument’s illustrations) or to take the conclusions of another person’s research as helpful is perfectly fine. The line between honest scholarship and plagiarism credit is simply this – omitting mention of the original source.
If, as I have sometimes observed, a Voynich writer includes, or omits, or fudges documentation for no better reason than that the pilfered matter comes from a scholar whose opinions differ from the pilferer’s own, it is not only an offence against the person whose work is plagiarised, it is an action essentially and inherently opposed to the nature of scholarly research – the object of which is always to rightly and accurately understand the subject of study, and this case Beinecke MS 408.
ANY serious researcher is entitled to offer an opinion, with accurate documentation of the evidence.
ANY serious researcher is also entitled to offer an informed critique of the study’s past evolution, its past errors, to credit the work of those who contributed valuable matter before, and to appreciate or to criticise what is being said and written at present.
I suggest, Mr. Sanders, that you forget about Byzantine tea-parties, inappropriate terms of endearment, and fantasies of a unitised front and either get serious or write works of fiction and publish them as fiction..
Di: you seem somehow to have missed your way on this thread line. Nick Pelling has books, novels apparently, that he want’s to offload, on the Voynich Manuscript, Can’t imagine how they could prove of any use to folks like your good self who set store by the 1910 original as proposed by Proto57 @ Rich Santalacoma
JS,
I looked this residence up under Conrad’s Wikipedia entry, and am guessing you mean Hong Kong’s Pensinsula Hotel. The entry says it is a claim that has no basis in fact. That may be. Who knows? Raffles Hotel in Singapore also makes that claim. I would be glad to go to either place to personally investigate. If one is into exotic hotels and people, in an undeniably fictious setting though tinged with enough fact to make you wonder, they should play the Browser based Failbetter Games, Fallen London, and/or Sunless Sea if you want to a more downloadable realtime version covering a much broader area. Both masterpieces by this fellow Alexis Kennedy. (this is good stuff guys) The SM would be well placed in these environs. (well the more mysterious one, not sure about Carl yet) I will add The End of the Tether to my reading list.
Jo, I will remember him, thank you milady.