Codex Sinaiticus, now online…

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The story as it appeared in the Guardian (thanks for the tip, Charles!) is refreshingly simple, sans any Dan Brown-esque cliché. Even though the oldest known book-format Bible ended up scattered across the globe, with sections in London, Leningrad, Leipzig and Sinai (the fragments most recently found turned up in Sinai only in 1975), a determined team of scholars decided to bring them all together to form a single, online publication. There was even a conference on it at the British Library this week.

International collaboration aside, the way the data is presented on the website has many nice aspects, such as the fundamentally codicological mindset (the RGB images and raking angle images are just a click away from each other, though it’s a shame that you can’t switch from one to the other while under magnification), the parallel transcription, etc.

For the Voynich Manuscript, broadly similar things have been suggested for years: in fact, I’d say almost every Voynich expert has secretly wished for an Encyclopaedia Voynichiana, a book comprising not only good quality scans of each page, but also a transcription, detailed commentary on that page’s drawings and colours, unusual Voynichese word-patterns, contact transfers, and marginalia. The problem, of course, is that even if such a book could actually be written, it would be almost certainly be 3,000-pages long, which is longer even than Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (and with almost as many footnotes).

The only reason that this kind of project is even remotely conceivable is because of the effort and resources the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library put into scanning the VMs: but to a very great degree over the last couple of years, I’ve come to realize the limits of this knowledge – that while it has enabled us to document the two-dimensional surface of the Voynich Manuscript (almost to the point of fetishizing it!), it has simultaneously blocked us from its inner dimensions, the codicological ‘superstrings’ coiled up within each mark.

Some days, I look at things like the Codex Sinaiticus and think: how wonderfully transparent it would be to work on an object of knowledge that was so gloriously shallow. But then I inevitably return to the sheer mountain face of the VMs, advancing one fragile epistemological fingerhold at a time: perhaps the climber is defined by the hill. 🙂

Voynich filigree?

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An intriguing email just arrived on Cipher Mysteries’ virtual doormat: recent blog subscriber Anna Castriota (thanks for writing, Anna!) asks whether I think there is any sign of filigree in the Voynich Manuscript.

Of course, as per normal with the VMs, the answer is a “tentative maybe”. There are good grounds for believing that its author had been exposed to an eclectic range of artistic influences that we can glimpse expressed in different ways, so it would not be a huge surprise if filigree was also on this list. But… was it?

Technically, filigree is formed from twisted gold or silver wires: and if you go looking for its characteristic shape in the VMs, I think you might just about note a resemblance in the exterior lines of the sun face and moon face “calendar” pages.

f67r1-filigree

Voynich Manuscript, f67r1 (“moon face calendar”), detail

f68v1-filigree

Voynich Manuscript, f68v1 (“sun face calendar”), detail

Of couse, if you were to point out that this is a pretty tenuous comparison, I’d have to agree. 😉 

However… I suspect it is instead rather more useful to hunt through the VMs looking for the spirit of Quattrocento filigree decoration, wherein goldsmiths repetitively filled out basic designs with dense filigree twists. If I’ve got the history right, this was a mid-Quattrocento precursor to what Warburg called the horror vacui, the abhorrence of emptiness – a fashion that crept into decorative artworks after the 1480 rediscovery of Nero’s Golden House (Domus Aurea) with its numerous busy images – according to which artists strove to fill every inch of decorated surface with a mass of buzzing details. An accessible source on these ‘grotesques’ is Chapter 7 of Joscelyn Godwin’s “The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance”: but (unless you happen to know better) I happen to think filigree goldsmiths basically got there first.

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, I think a relevant piece of forensic inference is that there are good codicological grounds for concluding that many of its later (more sophisticated) drawings were executed in two basic passes: (1) a primary layout pass (probably expressing the basic idea) , and (2) a secondary decorative pass (probably concealing that basic idea, for whatever reason). So, our research question then becomes whether we can detect this filigree design spirit at play in the Voynich Manuscript’s more decorated pages…

And you know, on balance, I think that we probably can: the key example I would give is the pair of “magic circle” pages. These comprise two circular diagrams on adjacent pages, one with a sun shape in the centre (f85r2) the other with a moon (f86v4), but both surrounded by four human figures at 90 degrees to each other.

two-magic-circles-small

What, you can only see the four characters on the left-hand magic circle? Well… I’ll come to that shortly.

What is particularly curious about these is that the second “moon” magic circle drawing has been obscured by layer upon layer of dense decoration, such that the four figures around the centre (along with a series of other details) are barely visible. That is, while the left one is completely undecorated, the right one is abundantly overdecorated to the point of total coverage.

 second-magic-circle-small

In the immortal words of Rolf Harris CBE, “Do you know what it is yet?” If you’re still having trouble seeing this, here is that same magic circle one last time with all the concealing decorative stuff removed (though fairly inexpertly, and at low resolution):-

 second-magic-circle-stripped-bare

And no, I too have no idea what this denotes or means. But I am pretty sure (from the different inks that were used) that this diagram was drawn in multiple stages, with something not dissimilar to the stripped-out version being the result of the first (expressive) drawing phase, and the preceding image being the result of the second (concealing) phase.

Whatever was originally depicted here, it is hard not to conclude that the author wanted to obscure the structure of this particular page, and so filled in every available space with a dense thicket of misleading detail. Ultimately, this reminds me very strongly of the repetitive decorative nature of filigree decoration – which is why I pointed towards a “tentative maybe” right at the top of the page. 🙂

You can also see this kind of busy, space-filling activity at play on the nine-rosette fold-out page (which is actually on the reverse side of the same folio as the magic circles pages). Here again you can see what appears to be the initial expressive phase (in lighter ink) and a later space-filling phase (in darker ink, and painted in). Quite why this should be so remains a mystery, but I do suspect that here again it was added to distract attention away from the original content of the page.

nine-rosette-filigree

All of which therefore suggests that it might be a (quite literally) revealing exercise to look at the nine rosettes through multispectral filters, to see if we can determine if they similarly began life unadorned, but were then über-decorated at a later stage. Perhaps the right question to be asking of all the drawings hasn’t to date really been asked: what is signal, and what is noise?

Of course, it has been suggested that these filled-out circular designs are merely scribal doodles, time-filling graffiti, a bored student in his medical class, etc: but then again, nobody now looks at the “Academia Leonardi Vi[n]ci” circular knot roundel prints from circa 1500 and calls them mere doodles, so what are the rules in this game, hmmm? Or is this just symptomatic of one of those semantically irregular verbs, that shade away when applied to people you don’t much care for: “I design, you sketch, he/she doodles“?

academialeonardivinci-small

“Academia Leonardi Vici”, print at the British Museum “(After) Leonardo da Vinci”

I sometimes get accused of reading too much into all these fragments: but when you put them together, they very often do afford us glimpses into their secret shared life. This, in the end, is what Art History is all about: for all its forensic aspirations, it is largely a romantic discipline, built on the faint hope that the notion of technique relied upon by each generation of artist will be sufficiently expressed in their works to reconstruct a narrative of continuity across the centuries.

But sometimes, it’s hard to actually put this into practice without feeling somewhat akin to “The Mentalist”: empathetically channelling a torrent of details to bring them back to life as a stream of narrative. But is it only in TV Land that this approach can solve whodunits, or is “The Mentalist” actually a closet art historian? [*]

[*] And yes, I did happen to see “The Mentalist” Episode 1-13 (“Paint It Red”) where Patrick Jane switched a pair of canvases to get a stolen $50m 15th century painting back from a Russian mobster. Be assured that proper art historians don’t do that (well, not often, anyway). 😉

VBI, now in English English!

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His eyes stinging from all the Google Translate hits popping up on his server logs (what did I tell you?), Elias Schwerdtfeger posted up an English translation of his Voynich Bullshit Index post from a couple of days ago, no doubt cursing me through gritted teeth as he typed. 🙂

By my reckoning, I reckon my Averlino theory in “The Curse of the Voynich” gets:

  • 10 points initial float (i.e. for having any kind of theory)
  • 2 points x 8 years wasted
  • 9 points x 2 identified nine-rosette buildings – St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Castello Sforzesco in Milan
  • 9 points x 2 buildings identified after visiting them

…that is, a grand total of 62 points. Not bad: but in the words of most school reports, Could Do Better. 🙂

The “Voynich Bullshit Index”…

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Here’s a Voynich page that made me laugh, and I hope it will do broadly the same for you too. 🙂

Elias Schwerdtfeger has posted a new meta-theoretical analysis tool to his blog, called VBI – short for the “Voynich Bullshit Index“. By carefully testing your pet Voynich theory against his long checklist of questions (each with its own VBI point rating), you can work out how high your overall VBI rating is… that is, how close to the perfect bullshit Voynich theory you have reached.

For maximum satirical effect, Elias includes a number of questions designed specifically to penalize various well-known Voynich theories: and yes, my Averlino theory is one of them, but I’d probably have been vastly disappointed if he hadn’t. 🙂

Sadly for Anglophones, Elias’ VBI post is only in German – but if you nag him enough (leaving a comment should do the trick) to add an English translation, I guess he probably will. Alternatively, you can annoy him by clicking here to look at his page via Google Translate: he’s forever trawling through his server logs for Google Translate entries and then moaning at me about my inability to read German, which isn’t strictly true – I actually sometimes use it because of my inability to read his German. Which, having just seen what a dog’s dinner Google Translate makes of his post, I don’t feel quite so bad about any more. 😉

Enjoy! 🙂

“WordPress Comment” FeedFlare (say what?)

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Just a quick note to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers (and if you’re one of those 20-odd people who seem to drop by nearly every day but without actually subscribing – why not have new posts appear in your inbox? It costs nothing, just click on the box at the top right or get the Cipher Mysteries RSS feed through a feed reader.) 

You may have noticed that the free service I use to email the current day’s post is from FeedBurner (which was not so long ago acquired by Google). However, despite the fact that there are a quazillion WordPress bloggers out there, FeedBurner’s WordPress integration remains a bit on the thin side.

A few days ago, I made a tentative first step towards fattening this up, by writing my own WordPress Comment “FeedFlare” (a tiny script that uses XML-based transformation magic to do handy things). So, email subscribers should now see a clickable Click Here To Leave A Comment On The Blog! link at the bottom of new posts – clicking on this should take you directly to the “Leave A Comment” section at the bottom of that post, directly on the website.

If I could automatically fill out the fields on the form for you, I would: but this isn’t something that FeedBurner / FeedFlare can currently do, unfortunately. Like I say, support is s bit thin. 🙁

Voynich challenges, updated…

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Every few years, I get around to posting a list of Voynich challenges – things about the Voynich Manuscript that we would like to know or to find out.

Looking back at my 2001 list of Voynich Challenges, I seem to have been flailing around at every codicological nuance going: yes, there are hundreds of interesting angles to consider – but how many stand any chance of yielding something substantial? With the benefit of just a little hindsight, I’d say… realistically, almost none of them (unfortunately).

Stepping onwards to my 2004 list of Voynich research tasks, which was instead mainly focused on a particularly narrow research question – whether Wilfrid Voynich lost any pages of the VMs. (Having myself consulted the UPenn archives in 2006, I’m certain the answer is a resounding ‘no’.)

Also in 2004, the release of the (generally excellent) MrSID scans by the Beinecke Library (even though it carried out test scans in 2002) was also an important landmark for study of the VMs, because it allowed anybody to look closely at the primary evidence on their own PC without having to trek to New Haven. Many old questions (particularly about colour) that had bounced around on the original VMs mailing list for years were suddenly able to be answered reasonably definitively.

Hurling our nuclear-powered DeLorean fast-forward to June 2009, what things do we now want to know? And moreover, even if we do find them out, does any of them stand any chance of helping us?

For all the determined work over the years that has been put into trawling the post-1600 archives (particularly Kircher’s correspondence), I can’t help but think that there can be precious little left to find of significant value. It has been a nice, well-defined project – but can I suggest we put it behind us now? The presence of 15th century handwriting (on f116v) and 15th century quire numbers surely makes this avenue no more than a fascinating diversion, no more useful than a forensic dissection of (say) Petrus Beckx’s life. Ultimately, “what happened to the VMs after 1600?” is surely one of the many convenient (but wrong) questions to be asking.

But what, then, are the right questions to be asking? In my opinion, the seven most fruitful historical research challenges currently awaiting significant attack are the  following…

(1) Understanding the ownership marginalia on f1r, f17r, f66r and f116v, in particular what caused the text on them to end up so confused and apparently unreadable – even their original language(s) (Latin, French, German, Occitan or Voynichese?) is/are far from certain. Whatever details turn up from this research (dates, names, places, languages, etc) may well open the door onto a whole new set of archival resources not previously considered. Alas, delayering these marks is just beyond the reach of the Beinecke’s scans – so unless our Austrian TV documentary friends have already deftly covered this precise angle (and I’m sure they are aware of this issue), I think this would be a fantastic, relatively self-contained codicological / palaeographic research project for someone to take on. Do you know a Yale codicologist looking for a neat term project?

(2) Palaeographically matching the VMs’ quire numbering scheme – abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals (but with Arabic digits for the most part). Again, this should be a self-contained palaeographic research project, one that a determined solo investigator could carry out (say) just using the British Library’s resources. Again, if this suggests links to documents with reasonably well-defined provenances or authorship, it may well open up an entirely new archival research angle to pursue.

(3) Examining the “aiiv” groups for steganography, both in Currier A and in Currier B. I’ve made a very specific prediction, based on carefully observing the VMs at first hand – that in the Herbal-A pages, the “scribal flourish” was added specifically to hide an earlier (less subtle) attempt at steganography, based on dots. A multi-spectral scan of some of these “aiiv” groups might well make reveal the details of this construction, and (with luck) cast some light on the writing phases the author went through. Definitively demonstrating the presence of steganography should also powerfully refute a large number of the theories that have floated around the VMs for years.

(4) Reconstructing the original bifolio nesting of the VMs. Glen Claston and I have attempted to do this from tiny codicological clues, but this is in danger of stalling for want of applicable data. But what kind of data that could be collected non-destructively be useful? Ideally, it would be good if we could perform some kind of DNA matching (to work out which bifolios came from the same animal skin), as this would give a very strong likelihood of connecting groups of pages together – and with that in place, many more subtle symmetries and handwriting matches might become useful. Would different animal skins autofluoresce subtly differently? I think there’s a fascinating research project waiting in there for someone who comes at this from just the right angle.

(5) Documenting and analyzing the VMs’ binding stations. If the VMs happens to go in for restoration at any point (which the Beinecke curators have mentioned at various points as being quite likely), I think it would be extremely revealing if the binding stations and various sewing holes on each bifolio were carefully documented. These might well help us to work out how the various early bindings worked, which in turn should help us reconstruct what early owners did to the manuscript, and (with luck) what the original ‘alpha’ state of the manuscript was.

(6) Carefully differentiating between Currier-A and Currier-B, building up specific Markov-like models for the two “languages”, and working out (from their specific differences) how A was transformed into B. This may not sound like much, but an awful lot of cryptological machinery would need to rest on top of this to make any kind of break into the system.

(7) Making explicit Glen Claston’s notion of script & language evolution over the various writing phases. This would involve a combination both of palaeography and statistical analysis, to understand how Voynichese developed, both as a writing system and a cryptographics system. There’s a great idea in there, but it has yet to be expressed in a really detailed, substantial way.

In retrospect, a lot of the art historical things that preoccupied many Voynich researchers (myself included) back in 2002-2005 such as comparisons with existing drawings, the albarelli, etc now seem somewhat secondary to me. This is because we have a solid date range to work with: the Voynich Mauscript (a) was made after 1450 (because of the presence of parallel hatching in the nine-rosette page), and (b) was made before 1500 (because of the presence of two 15th century hands, in the quire numbers and on f116v).

Some people (particularly those whose pet theories don’t mesh with this 1450-1500 time frame) try to undermine this starting point, but (frankly) the evidence is there for everyone to see – and I think it’s time we moved on past this, so as to take Voynich research as a whole up to the next level. Though researchers have put in a terrific amount of diffuse secondary research over the years, collectively our most productive task now is to forensically dissect the primary evidence, so as to wring out every last iota of historical inference – only then should we go back to the archives.

Will these seven basic challenges still all be open in 2012, a hundred years after Wilfrid Voynich claimed discovery of his eponymous manuscript in a Jesuit trunk? I sincerely hope not – but who is going to step forward to tackle them?

Italian Voynich talks…

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Of course, the minute I post about Voynich talks, several more suddenly pop up. 🙂

The ‘Heaven Astrolabe’ blogger (Margherita Fiorello) gave a nicely-meandering (but picture-heavy) description of wandering across Rome to see a talk on the Voynich Manuscript, held on the 23rd June 2009 at the Libreria Aseq esoteric bookshop (a bit like an upmarket Italian version of Treadwells, if you like). The occasion (“L’Enigma del Manoscritto Voynich – Il più grande mistero di tutti i tempi“) was prompted by the release of the Italian edition of Marcelo Dos Santos’ book (he’s Argentinian, just so you know), and consisted of discussion by Stefano Verdini (who researches things “beyond reality”) and Rome-based Japanese medievalist (and Voynich fan) Yoshi Ohashi, who also brought along some of his artworks to display (I think).

And then I found another recent talk, this time called “Voynich: il libro che nessuno sa leggere” from 15th April 2009 at the even more evocative location of the Villa Mondragone (yes, really!) Of the two people at the front table, presumably one is a PR lady from Edizioni Mediterranee and the other (with his thumbs superglued to his chin, if you like early Steve Martin films) Marcelo Dos Santos himself.

What is acutely ironic, of course, is that if my whole Filarete-as-author-of-the-VMs theory is correct, then the VMs started its life in Rome. But I doubt that got mentioned at either talk, right?

Incidentally, in “The Curse of the Voynich”, I allocated a paltry 13 pages to the history of the Voynich Manuscript – and even that was a bit excessive. Yet the whole history-of-a-mystery angle is all that journalistic angles on the VMs (particularly Kennedy & Churchill’s book, and Marcelo Dos Santos’ book to a lesser degree) tend to focus on. Yet the actual problem of the VMs is not one of provenance – because it doesn’t really have one, sorry René! – but rather one of intellectual history. That is, why don’t any of the myriad of details fit together, either individually or when taken as a whole?

I suppose I’ve now become hungry for an entirely different type of public discussion – what I term “broadcast-only” lectures don’t really work for me any more. I’m also hugely tired of people repeatedly trotting out the wrong answers (such as “alchemy” or “conspiracy”) to the wrong questions (“what secrets might the VMs contain?”). Technically, what Annales historians call the “problématique” – the linked set of questions people use to define a research area – is massively ill-defined in the case of the VMs. Basically, if Claude Lévi-Strauss is correct in asserting that “the scholar is not he who gives the right answers, but he who asks the right questions“, I think I can honestly say that there are precious few genuine Voynich scholars out there – and we are all the worse for that scarcity.

Upcoming François Almaleh talk…

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As part of this year’s week-long typography event at Lurs (August 2009), long-time Voynichologist François Almaleh will be giving a talk on “Le manuscrit Voynich” – but ignore the typo on the page which makes it look as if his session is something to do with HELMO (which is actually the joint name of two French graphic artists – here’s a nice example of their work), because it isn’t.

Incidentally, Almaleh’s website has plenty of interesting pearls for the reasonably determined diver to harvest, such as his discussion [in French] of American artist Timothy C Ely’s mysteriously beautiful book “The Flight into Egypt” (1985), which also tangentially notes points of comparison with Luigis Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus.

Hmmm… what with Rene Zandbergen not so long ago and now François Almaleh as well, it does make me wonder whether I should give some talks on the Voynich Manuscript. Our much-appropriated manuscript has stoically endured such a lot of nonsense over the last century, so perhaps it is time to make some kind of public stand. Basically, I think we now know enough to start piecing together its real secret history – so really, if a satirical XKCD mention is enough to treble the VMs’ online visibility, we ought to be doing rather better at getting that essential story across.

But what would be the best format for a Voynich talk session? In some ways, a formally-structured lecture is of little use circa 2009 – does anybody need a Wikipedia-esque recap? Perhaps if people planning to attend the talk (or, in fact, anybody) were to email their own questions in beforehand (or even submit questions on the night), that might give more of a interactive taste of what Voynich research is all about.

What questions would you have me answer on a Voynich talk? What questions do you think would really put me on the spot? 🙂

A new Voynich research angle…

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On the one hand, I’ve spent years trying to reconstruct the “inner history” of the Voynich Manuscript: while on the other, I’ve spent the same period trying to deconstruct the subtle fault-lines in its cipher system. History and science: the ultimate epistemological pincer attack, if you will.

In that general vein, here’s a new research angle on the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher to think about, that’s supported on both sides by very specific art historical reasoning and statistical reasoning.

Firstly, the art history. Quite independently of the question of authorship, I recently argued (in my post on Voynich Q13) that Q13b (baths) is to Q13a (something disguised as baths) as Herbal-A (agriculture) is to Herbal-B (something disguised as agriculture). This same relationship may well hold true for the ‘pharmacological’ pages, in that Q19 pharma (visual recipes) may bear the same relation to some or all of Q15 pharma (something disguised as visual recipes).

I have also argued on codicological grounds that the patterns resembling aiiv and aiir we see densely scattered throughout the VMs were intended to resemble medieval folio references, while concealing some other information (probably Arabic numbers). My hypothesis is that this steganography was initially achieved (early in the Currier-A phase) by placing dots over the various aiiv instances, but that the author then decided this was too obvious and so went through the text adding scribal flourishes connecting the right-hand edge of the v-shape to the flying dot. However, by the time of the Currier-B phase, the same aiiv pattern was used as a covertext, but a different kind of steganography was used for the concealed text – here, the overall shape of the final “v” letter seems to have been used as the enciphering mechanism. What I like about this is that it should be able to be tested by a careful spectroscopic scan of the aiiv instances. I suspect that it will be amazing how much you can tell from the evolution of a single pattern across the VMs’ pages.

Put all this together, and what I think emerges is a picture of a cipher system that is evolving across multiple phases – the Currier-A dot phase, perhaps a Currier-A pure loop phase, a Currier-B v-shape phase. Glen Claston has his own ideas on the evolution and gestation of the pages (along broadly similar lines), so this isn’t really massive news on its own.

Secondly, the statistics. Since Prescott Currier proposed his two-language (Currier A and Currier B) model in 1976, it is sadly true that far more people have picked up on what this “split” might imply than have tried to actually statistically analyze it in a deeper way. What are those differences, though?

  • -dy: rare in A, very common in B
  • chol-, chor-, and chot-: very common in A, rare in B
  • cth-: common in A, rare in B
  • chain, chaiin:  medium frequency in A, rare in B

To which I would add that qol- occurs 20x more often in B than in A, and that if you remove all ol and al pairs, the remaining freestanding ls occur 8x more often in B than in A.

All of which leads to this basic observation: currently, I think that the very best explanation of why the ‘formation rules’ of Currier B differ from the formation rules of Currier A is that I believe that the Voynich’s author evolved the system from A to B not to accommodate another language or dialect, but rather to hide perceived weaknesses in the Currier A cipher system.

This then suggests a new cryptological research angle: if we can statistically identify what specific patterns were removed from Currier A during the transition to Currier B (and perhaps even identify matching patterns that were added to Currier B), then we might, with a little luck, start to work out why the author thought they were weaknesses in the cipher system.

As an example, could it be that many of the instances of ch (or, more likely, cho)in Currier A reappear as freestanding l in Currier B? If so, why did the author evolve Voynichese in this way? Was he hiding a weakness in the cipher system? Did the author judge that the first phase’s cho was unnecessarily verbose, and so came to replace it by the (much more compact) freestanding l in later phases?

Roberto Salvidio’s Italian Voynich novel “Codex”…

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Words reaches Cipher Mysteries ears (via the Italian Wikipedia Voynich page) of a new Italian Voynich-themed novel called “Codex” by Roberto Salvidio. The story begins when an unknown person sends a manuscript to Mary Radclyffe’s family: from then on, she’s on the run until she can decode the Voynich Manuscript. There’s plenty of esotericism and a sprinkling of Leonardo in the mix – sounds like a bit of fun.

Naturally, I then contacted Roberto Salvidio via Facebook: he told me that he is currently looking for an English translator for “Codex”: if that sounds like something you might like to be involved in, please feel free to contact him.

Intriguingly, Roberto also mentioned that he put his own cipher challenge at the end of his book. Would you like to see it? Of course you would! So, here it is (with his permission):-

12 6 7 1 ­ 8 5 27 5 8 / 6 8 7 27 ( – 7 2 8 5 7 9 / 5 9 8 6 _ 4 33  4 3 23 7 ) 7 5 34 5 ­ 13 4 5 1 ( 7 1 7 4 5 _ 12 3 6 \ 3 15 8 9 5 4  ­ 16 ) 3 9 3 5 1 _ 8 9 4 3 1 7 5 ( 2 6 ­ 3 29 7 16 2  2 ­ 9 7 5 24 9 5 27 \ 4 7 5 8 _ 5 8 9 8 4 / 13 9 7 1 ) 4 5 6 7 8 5  12 \ 2 7 9 5 2 43 1 ­ 7 6 28 5 4 5 7 9 / 3 5 6 8 9 8 3 4 _ 3 21 3  26 3 \ 4 24 3 7 9 3 27 ( 5 9 7 13 2 8 2 7 6 _ 8 13 15 7 \ 8 5 4 ­  2 8 9 3 4 / 12 _ 4 9 3 23 ) 3 7 3 9 1 ­ 9 14 8 7 9 7 2 6 1 \ 8 16  8 6 3 1
2 7 44 9 ­ 5 7 28 5 – ( 3 8 4 4 9 _ 9 5 1 3 ) 3 26 7 9 ­ 9  9 8 13 1 5 4 \ 5 38 1 5 _ 5 89 8 4 ( 7 1 9 ­ 2 61 7 2 ) 4 9 3 6 7 _  6 89 49 8 36 8 9 5 ( 9 1 4 4 1 3 ­ 1 7 3 9 ) \ 81 ( 56 7 84 3 1 /  4 77 6 1 7 19 / 3 8 65 84 _ 76 94 9 3 2 ) 6 8 94 ­ 5 87 9  ­ 2 7 / 1 7 58 28 4 / 7 3 ­ 8 13 9 ­ 1 7 9 3 / 5 7  5 7 1 4 ( 6 2 ­ 51 7 3 ) 3 15 9 3 \ 4 91 7 2 ­ 9 8 75 8 4 / 3  3 65 8 _ 6 9 44 3 7 \ 5 4 3 15 ­ 32 6 7 9 3 / 1 5 49 8 ( 5 4 19 9 8  5 ­ 19 / 6 8 9 _ 8 5 3 44 7 ) 6 8 49 5 1 ­ 6 7 18 18 ­ 7 2 88 6 ­ 4 2 7 9 6 3 ( 9 8 5 8 4 / 4 6 1 7 9 ) 8 4 7  7 23 \ 8 7 7 1 6 – / 7 13 _ 2 45 8 7 4 \ 7 6 18 ­ 4 8 7 9 16  ­ 5 8 9 4 3 1 ( _ 5 8 5 9 3 1 _ 5 8 33 6 5 8 4 4 _ 4 9 6 7 6 32 \  7 4 24 7 8 9 ­ 23 9 16 ) 8 3 7 2 _ 7 5 8 29 8 1 3 4 _ 27 \ 13 4 5  1 ( 2 7 8 66 _ 4 9 6 7 6 3 2 )
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– 8 7 44 2 ( 5 18 9 4 5 _ 8 5 31 ) 4 8 7 5 4 / 4 5 ( 5 8 1 ­ 3 7 9  1 ­ 33 1 8 9 ­ 27 1 7 1 ) 44 5 9 3 \ 15 14 1 9 18 9  9 ­ 6 28 7 4 3 9 / 6 3 4 6 5 _ 4 7 2 1 8 5 \ 5 8 13 4 9 ­ 15 15 ( 7 14 / 44 8 7 6 9 ) 18 5 1 _ 8 9 5 6 8 ( 3 4 15 ­ 4 3 7 5 4 ) 3  4 2 5 15 3 _ 5 8 9 8 4 8 ( 16 7 8 7 2 5 3 9 ­ 9 8 5 4 5 7 5 8 / 66  88 7 2 ( 5 8 9 4 31 ­ 6 8 4 3 9 17 ) 3 4 5 8 13 7 ) 9 8 4 5 7  ­ 27 19 6 44 9 ­ 48 7 6 19 1 / 8 4 7 2 8 21 _ 12 6 3 12 3  3 \ 3 4 2 7 9 4 ( 2 7 88 6 _ 4 5 8 67 1 23 ) 8 5 7 / 7 28 _ 7 28 5 4 21 \ 6 3 7 9 6 7 2 ­ 6 17 2 3 7 9 / 11 7 6 3 8 2 ( 9 7 1 44 5 2 4  ­ 11 77 9 7 6 ) 4 5 6 7 8 7 3 5 \ 11 3 9 8 1 ­ 7 4 9 4 6 /  / 5 9 _ 3 5 13 7 18 \ 2 7 12 ­ 3 5 1 7 3 / 6 7 2 8 6 _ 8 5 4 2 3 7 \  8 5 4 19 8 ­ 8 7 4 3 9 28 6 ­ 9 88 5 14 ( 2 7 1 _ 5 7 4 2  2 \ 9 31 8 9 ­ 3 77 9 11 ) 4 9 6 7 6 3 2 _ 3 8 3 44 3 66 ( 3 14 5 \  4 9 3 24 \ 13 2 4 3 2 7 9 ­ 19 7 3 ) 4 5 8 7 24 \ 6 2 7 12 ( 8 66  _ 8 5 9 31 \ 8 5 9 44 3 1 ­ 8 4 ) 5 8 6 7 _ 4 9 ( 5 88 9 3 11
­ 7 16 4 7 6 9 / 3 6 8 55 6 _ 9 33 2 4 9 6 77 \ 88 7 12 5 9 8 4 5  ­ 88 6 8 7 9 34 / 32 88 9 8 3 _ 6 7 2 4 9 5 18 66).
Doubtless if you do crack it, he’ll put a trickier one in the English edition. Enjoy! 🙂