Review of “The Voynich Enigma”…

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Back in January, I predicted that 2008 would be “the year of the Voynich” – not that it would get solved (don’t be so ridiculous, tcha!), but rather that we would be engulfed in a semi-tsunami of Voynich-related fiction, a novelistic response to the VMs meme as it seeps into mainstream culture. And this wave has indeed hit the shore: my big fat list of Voynich novels lists five new titles for the year (plus a couple of others held over until 2009) as well as a rerelease of Max MacCoy’s 1994 Indiana Jones / Voynich book.

And so to the latest one, William “Baz” Cunningham’s just-released third novel “The Voynich Enigma“. For connoisseurs of the genre, this runs on eerily familiar rails: the hero stumbles across a key to the Voynich Manuscript, eventually discovers that it encodes some kind of treasure map (in this case, to the much-speculated-upon Templar hoard), battles against someone else racing for the same treasure (in this case, an evil Mamluk), and so forth. I’m sure You Get The General Idea.

I also have to flag straight off that this is self-publishing at its most “self-“: the author inserts into his narrative a thinly fictionalized version of, errrm, himself (though changing his nickname from “Baz” to “Bones” ), his cousin, his wife, his dog, etc. Perhaps some passing Eng. Lit. grad student will let us know the correct academic name for such faux-autobiographical works (might it be “biographique”?): certainly, it takes the phrase “identifying with the hero” onto a whole new level.

Cunningham’s writing is a bit “Tom Sawyer, Detective” meets Simon Singh, a little bit like hominy grits festooned with lumps of historical meat. But for all the homespun backyardiness, it does have an undeniable charm that makes the 300+ pages an easy read. Mercifully, it is free of overblown Hollywoodesque fights and bad sex scenes, even if prizes are at stake nowadays (one gets the feeling Mrs Cunningham would not have been impressed).

It’s true that the book’s only joke – that, yes, college-educated Americans can actually be smart sometimes – does wear a tad thin by the end. And that its history research does often tend to the superficial. And that the historical dialogue is occasionally too modern-sounding for purists. And that Roger Bacon really, truly didn’t create the VMs (Cunningham relied mainly on Levitov’s book). But for all that, it’s perfectly OK.

Even classifying it as a “novel” rather misses the point: it is closer to some kind of Cunningham family pipedream, thin tendrils of historical smoke above a West Virginia farmhouse coiling together to form a novel-like shape in the still air: it’s a hopeful fantasy, blending past, present, and future into a home-cooked dish du jour.

Oddly, “The Voynich Enigma” most reminds me of Filarete’s libro architettonico. Back in 1465, the Italian architect Filarete concocted a strange ad hoc mélange of autobiography, architecture, fiction, and fantasy to try to promote himself to powerful patrons: without book distributors looking to its back cover for a helpful shelving genre to slot his book into, he was free to say just what he wanted, and in whatever way he wanted. To me, what links Filarete and Cunningham across the five centuries is simply an idiosyncratic self-publishing idealism, that really isn’t about the launch party, the PR, the film options, the points above the line, the Frankfurt & London circus, or even the making money.

Perhaps, ultimately, the Voynich Manuscript itself will turn out to be just as idealistic, a document whose hidden treasure will simply be what it says about its author – the ultimate piece of self-publishing, with a print-run of one. 🙂

Two FBI Ciphers from Life Magazine…

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Google recently put up a large collection of images from Life Magazine: and as you’d expect, various Netizens are poring over the visually-rich archive to find anything unexpected, such as this unidentified number-based ciphertext from 1957. Frustratingly, searches of the Life archive seem to be limited to a maximum of 200 results, so you have to use a little less brute force to find interesting things than you might otherwise employ.

I found some pictures on simple steganography, such as a 1941 FBI demonstration showing a cover letter and the hidden UV message written between the lines, and even a message hidden in the lining of an envelope. Or perhaps you’d be like me and prefer seeing Groucho Marx hiding a message on a lady’s back?

Hey, I’m only scratching the surface: the Entropic Memes blogger (“Nemo de Monet“) dug far deeper, and uncovered what appears to be a faked up FBI cipher (a monoalphabetic simple substitution cipher with fake text, nothing fancy) from 1944, and – far more interestingly – an early-WWII transposition cipher from 24 July 1940, complete with the encrypting worksheet all in place. Our chum Nemo suspects that the “Dunn” in the message was Fritz Duquesne, part of the Duquesne spy ring. Not really my period, but fascinating stuff nonetheless…

Voynich researcher of the week…

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A Quality Assurance auditor from Cross Plains, Wisconsin, Mark Sullivan has been thinking about the VMs since the 1970s… and now suspects he has possibly glimpsed at least part of the answer, putting his current notes on a newly-started blog.

The key to it all, he believes, lies in the vertical column of Voynichese letters down the left-hand edge of page f66r: he thinks that the “9” character falls where vowels lie in the Latin alphabet, though when that pattern breaks down (at “O”), his idea is that the plaintext alphabet is somehow reversed (i.e. Z, Y, X, etc), which I take to mean something broadly along the following lines:-

Voynich Manuscript f66r, vertical column rearranged
Voynich Manuscript f66r, vertical column rearranged

Furthermore, he believes that paragraph-initial gallows “reflect forms of hic and qui“; that there is “an underlying system” involving “three columns with multiple sequences of equivalent letter groups“; and that there is also a kind of (verbose) number system at play.

Is this any good? To me, it hinges on what you make of the f66r vertical column. Though A, E and O do indeed match up nicely to the three “9” (EVA <y>) characters in the list, and “K” is apparently mapped to a rotated K glyph, the rest is fairly wobbly: F, M and W all map to the same “8” (EVA <d>) glyph, as do D and N (to the EVA <sh> pair), and the B and X (EVA <o>). Yet once you start introducing a degree of interpretation into a Latin-like text, you almost inevitably end up with something not too dissimilar to Brumbaugh’s ARABYCCUS and PAPERYCUS – fragmentary motes of Latin, evanescently bubbling to the surface in a sea of syllables.

These days, I don’t really have any belief that someone is going to waltz in from the wings holding aloft anything resembling a monoalphabetic substitution key to the VMs: and as a possible source for such a key, the vertical column on f66r doesn’t really do it for me. Moreover, I don’t think “K” appeared in the Latin alphabet as used by Quattrocento cipher makers, which would rather throw this sequence out. But perhaps I’ve got all that wrong, and should instead heed the wisdom of sagacious songwriter George Michael, who back in 1987 sang “I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith“. Oh, well!

Japanese Voynich academic…

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In glamorous Salford last year, the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history held a conference called Codices and Community: Networks of Reading and Production, 1350-1550. Just after the “Weird Science” panel chaired by Toshi Takamiya, there was a talk by Teru Agata (an associate professor at Asia University, a private university in Tokyo) and Mari Agata on “Applications of Text Clustering to the Voynich MS”.

Teru Agata subsequently gave a public seminar on the Voynich Manuscript in February 2008 at the University of Tsukuba, called “Judgment of the Possibility to break Undeciphered Documents -With the Example of the Most Mysterious Manuscript-“. And if the search box in Asia University’s website worked, perhaps there would be more I could dig up there.

OK, so in the big scheme of things “Japanese academic gives at least two talks on the VMs” isn’t really huge news. But it did make me think that perhaps I should start compiling a page listing academics who are actively looking at the VMs, such as Angela Catalina Ghionea (who I mentioned here), Volkhard Huth (who I mentioned here), Gordon Rugg / Andreas Schinner, possibly Peter Forshaw (who seems to enjoy surfing the Renaissance foam surrounding the VMs), and so on. Perhaps at some point they’ll form some kind of critical mass, and the VMs will start being taken seriously?

.

.

.

…errr, fat chance. 🙁

PS: Google Translate turned a Russian VMs webpage’s references to Rugg into “Ruggie”, “Ragg” and “Ragga”, which made for slightly surreal reading.

Review of “Renaissance Faces” (exhibition)…

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For me, there’s something wonderfully apposite about the “Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian” exhibition currently downstairs at the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery in London. Having just read and reviewed the revised (2006) edition of David Hockney’s “Secret Knowledge” book, the opportunity of looking really up close at some of the key pictures on Hockney’s wall was something I simply had to jump at.

The first obvious biggy there was Van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini couple, a fabulous picture by any standards. But was it eyeballed (painted from life in the conventional manner), projected (according to some abstract mathematical perspective scheme), traced (from some kind of clever optical projection, something like a curved mirror), gridded (through some kind of fixed eye-position gridded frame) or some ad hoc mix of all the above? There are plenty of (what seem to me) obviously eyeballed features, such as the dog and, indeed, the Arnolfini couple themselves: yet while Hockney’s key feature (the ornate chandelier) is an impressive piece of craft, the level of draughtsmanship apparent in the whole picture is extremely high (for example, Hockney’s book fails to stress the unbelievably tiny size of the two characters coming through the door reflected in the convex mirror on the back wall). Perhaps Hockney has got it right that Van Eyck did make us of some kind of technological assistance: but I really couldn’t stand up and say that this could only have been via optical trickery. In my experience, artists are highly ingenious people who will apply whatever tricks they can conjure up to the particular problem of depiction or representation in their mind at the time.

In short, “not proven”.

The second biggy was Giovanni Bellini’s scintillating, (literally) silky-smooth 1501 portrait of Doge Lorenzo Loredan. David Hockney places great value on the huge advances in rendering complex folded fabrics that artists made during the fifteenth century, followed by the similar advances made in rendering shiny objects (most notably polished armour and glass) during the sixteenth century. Cleverly, though, the exhibition curators placed Bellini’s Doge close to the 1454 bust of Niccolo Strozzi by Mino da Fiesole, where the pattern in the (probably silk velvet) fabric had been subtly rendered in stone. And I think this holds the real point about the shimmering Doge: that to me, it comes across not as having been executed within the tradition of painted portraiture, but instead as having been sculpted from light, in a way that is unnervingly close to cinematographic. Yet simultaneously, of all the portraits in the exhibition, Bellini’s Doge was – for all its svelte finesse and brilliant sheen – one of the least “alive”, in much the same way that ultra-high-speed photographs manage to sever their association with the sheer physicality of the subject.

The single technique that transformed during the 15th century involved a brand new way of seeing: unlearning what you would expect to see in a scene, and instead allowing yourself simply to be guided by the light. Painters had always painted what they saw, but as they now saw the world in a quite different way, the paintings they produced radically reflected that new vision: and paint technology changed (from egg tempera to oils) just as radically to support this vision.

Did some kind of projective / optical technological trick help (if not drive!) this Quattrocento sea-change in artistic approach and technique? David Hockney is convinced that there had to have been, while Martin Kemp remains agnostic (if not actually unconvinced). My own opinion is simply that unpicking the multiple overlapping revolutions that occurred during that period is a far trickier job than Hockney would like it to be: and that he is building his case on a relatively small set of features in paintings by painters with almost peerless technique.

But move on to the sixteenth century, and I think the whole question is thrown open again. There you have artists openly working with convex mirrors (such as Parmigianino’s self-portrait in a convex mirror of 1524), a slowly growing body of theoretical literature on the camera obscura, and the emergence, later in the century, of a certain look (tenebrous/flat backgrounds, sharply lit, optically dramatic, but with an often-unconvincing collage aspect) whose distinctive filmic virtuosity almost inevitably impresses the eye. Was this merely the Mannerist artistic fashion of the moment, or the necessary byproduct of an optical assist?

In this regard, one tiny detail in the National Gallery’s exhibition caught my eye. The picture called “Portrait of a Lady with Spindle and Distaff” by Maertin [Martin] van Heemskerck (dated 1529-1531) has an ultra-complex foreground object – an ornate spinning wheel on a decorated base. But there is one place where the picture appears (like a badly assembled railway station poster) to have been stuck together incorrectly. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me, and it’s right on the limit of what you can comfortably see in an A4-sized reproduction. Here, I’ve taken a small piece from the website of the Museo Thysen-Bornemisza in Madrid (which owns the picture), tweaked the brightness and contrast, and added an unsubtle red arrow to show where I think the collage-like break occurs:-

Is this (a) another possible smoking gun to add to Hockney’s list, (b) a faithful reproduction of a flaw in the actual marquetry, (c) a slip of the painter’s brush, or (d) a subtle mistake made by a later restorer? I’m just flagging it here, I’ll leave it to others to settle the question. If you’d like to have a look for yourself, the exhibition continues until the 18th January 2009 – it’s £10 to get in, and worth every penny (in my opinion).

Incidentally, van Heemskercks’ picture is reproduced on p.131 of the hefty (but beautiful) exhibition catalogue, which I’ll be reviewing in a few days’ time.

PS: Voynich completists will probably enjoy Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “Vertumnus” fruit-and-flower portrait of Rudolf II, as well as Holbein’s “Ambassadors” (with its array of finely-rendered Renaissance gadgetry), both also in the same exhibition! 🙂

The Scorpio “Scorpion” in the VMs…

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While snooping around the (mostly empty) user subsites on Glen Claston’s Voynich Central, I came across a page by someone called Robin devoted solely to the Scorpio “Scorpion” page in the VMs. This has an unusual drawing of a scorpion (or salamander) at the centre, and which I agree demands closer attention…

Voynich Manuscript f73r, detail of scorpion/salamander at centre of Scorpio zodiac circle

My first observation is that, while the paint in the 8-pointed star is very probably original, the green paint on the animal below is very likely an example of what is known as a “heavy painter” layer, probably added later. But what lies beneath that?

Luckily, there exists a tool for (at least partially) removing colour from pictures, based on a “colour deconvolution” algorithm originally devised (I believe) by Voynich researcher Gabriel Landini, and implemented as a Photoshop plugin by Voynich researcher Jon Grove. And so the first thing I wanted to do was to run Jon’s plugin, which should be simple enough (you’d have thought, anyway).

However… having bought a new PC earlier in the year and lost my (admittedly ancient) Adobe Photoshop installation CD, Photoshop wasn’t an easy option. I also hadn’t yet re-installed Debabelizer Pro, another workhorse batch image processing programme from the beginning of time that I used to thrash to death when writing computer games. If not them, then what?

Well, like many people, I had the Gimp already installed, and so went looking for a <Photoshop .8bf plugin>-loading plugin for that: I found pspi and gimpuserfilter. However, the latter is only for Linux, while the former only handles a subset of .8bf files… apparently not including Jon Grove’s .8bf (I think he used the excellent FilterMeister to write it), because this didn’t work when I tried it.

For a pleasant change, Wikipedia now galloped to the rescue: it’s .8bf page suggested that Helicon Filter – a relatively little-known non-layered graphics app from the Ukraine – happily runs Photoshop plugins. I downloaded the free version, copied Jon Grove’s filter into the Plug-ins subdirectory, and it worked first time. Neat! Well… having said that, Helicon Filter is quite (ready: “very”) idiosyncratic, and does take a bit of getting used to: but once you get the gist, it does do the job well, and is pleasantly swift.

And so (finally!) back to that VMs scorpion. What does lie beneath?

Voynich manuscript f73r detail, but with the green paint removed

And no, I wasn’t particularly expecting to find a bright blue line and a row of six or seven dots along its body either. Let’s use Jon’s plugin to try to remove the blue as well (and why not?):-

Voynich Manuscript f73r central detail, green and blue removed

Well, although this is admittedly not a hugely exact process, it looks to me to be the case that the row of dots was in the original drawing. Several of the other zodiac pictures (Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Sagittarius) have what appears to be rather ‘raggedy’ blue paint, so it would be consistent if Scorpio had originally had a little bit of blue paint too, later overpainted by the heavy green paint.

And so my best guess is that the original picture was (like the others I listed above) fairly plain with just a light bit of raggedy blue paint added, and with a row of six or seven dots along its body. But what do the dots mean?

I strongly suspect that these dots represent a line of stars in the constellation of Scorpio. Pulling a handy copy of Peter Whitfield’s (1995) “The Mapping of the Heavens” down from my bookshelf, a couple of quick parallels present themselves. Firstly, in the image of Scorpio in Gallucci’s Theatrum Mundi (1588) on p.74 of Whitfield, there’s a nice clear row of six or seven stars. Also, p.44 has a picture of Bede’s “widely-used” De Signis Coeli (MS Laud 644, f.8v), in which Scorpio’s scorpion has 4 stars running in a line down its back: while p.45 has an image from a late Latin version of the Ptolemy’s Almagest (BL Arundel MS 66, circa 1490, f.41) which also has a line of stars running down the scorpion’s back. A Scorpio scorpion copied from a 14th century manuscript by astrologer Andalo di Negro (BL MS Add. 23770, circa 1500, f.17v) similarly has a line of stars running down its spine.

In short, in all the years that we’ve been looking at the iconographic matches for the drawings at the centre of these zodiac diagrams, should we have instead been looking for steganographic matches for constellations of dots hidden in them?

Incidentally, another interesting thing about the Scorpio/Sagittarius folio is that the scribe changed his/her quill halfway through: which lets us reconstruct the order in which the text in those two pages was written.

Firstly, the circular rings of text and the nymphs were drawn for both the Scorpio and Sagittarius pages. The scribe then returned to the Scorpio page, and started adding the nymph labels for the two inner rings, (probably) going clockwise around from the 12 o’clock mark, filling in the labels for both circular rows of nymphs as he/she went. (Mysteriously, the scribe also added breasts to the nymphs during this second run). Then, when the quill was changed at around the 3 o’clock mark, the scribe carried on going, as you can see from the following image:-

Voynich manuscript f73r, label details (just to the right of centre)

What does all this mean? I don’t know for sure: but it’s nice to have even a moderate idea of how these pages were actually constructed, right? For what it’s worth, my guess is that these pages had a scribe #1 writing down the rings and the circular text first, before handing over to a scribe #2 to add the nymphs and stars: then, once those were drawn in, the pages were handed back to scribe #1 to add the labels (and, bizarrely, the breasts and probably some of the hair-styles too).

It’s a bit hard to explain why the author (who I suspect was also scribe #1) should have chosen this arrangement: the only sensible explanation I can think of is that perhaps there was a change in plan once scribe #1 saw the nymphs that had been drawn by scribe #2, and so decided to make them a little more elaborate. You have a better theory about this? Please feel free to tell us all! 🙂

“The Damned Book of the Templars” (in Spanish)…

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Another day dawns, and with it comes yet another Voynich novel with a Templar twist – Francisco Díaz Valladares’s just-released novel “El Libro Maldito de los Templarios” (The Damned Book of the Templars) is a twisty whodunit taking the Voynich Manuscript as its raw material.

For English-language novelists, the big mystery here might be how a Voynich novel like this can have an initial run of 5000 (with strong expectations of a second print run shortly afterwards), at a time when print run sizes are generally diminishing (apart from celeb-centric tosh, sadly). Actually, the answer is horrifically straightforward: Spaniards are simply more Voynich-savvy than UK or American readers – if you look at Google Trends for “Voynich”, French, Spanish, Italian and German all rank above English.

So, the salutory lesson of the day for all you lovely Anglophone Voynich novelists out there is this: perhaps you should think about how your book is going to translate (culturally, technically, conceptually) before you write even a word of it, because English readers (Melvyn Bragg aside, bless ‘im) have basically no idea what you’re talking about. In fact, why publish it in English at all?

Central London history / mystery book meet…?

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Here’s a quicky idea…

I have (possibly literally) a ton of books in my library, most of which seems to revolve around early modern / Renaissance history, telescopes, ciphers, and themes touching on aspects of the Voynich Manuscript. And somehow the mound keeps on growing, week on week. Even though I love them all, I can appreciate that (actually) this is a bit of a waste: and that I should really find some way of sharing the ones I’m not currently referring to with like-minded telescope / mystery / cipher / history aficionados (such as you, of course!)

All the same, it’s not immediately obvious how. For example, Marke Fincher wants (quite rightly) to borrow my copy of James Morrison’s excellent book “The Astrolabe” – but it’s a hefty old thing, and so wouldn’t be cheap to pop in the post. And so the right question to ask is: what’s a good way to share?

The image vaguely forming in my mind is of a roughly-once-a-month meet in a central London pub, where I wheel along a heap of books (some pre-requested, others just of general interest) and merrily pass them on, hoping to see them return intact at some stage in the future. I’ve been meaning to meet up with various people anyway (basically, to catch up with Marke and Philip Neal etc), and so adding a book-sharing angle on it seems to me like an eminently sensible community-ish thing to do.

Would anyone else be interested? Email me or comment below, thanks! 🙂

Review of “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers”…

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A few days ago, chess-playing crypto guy Tony Gaffney emailed Cipher Mysteries about “The Subtelty Of Witches” in the British Library: I also blogged about his attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher and the (not-very-)Ancient Cryptography forum where he often posts on historical ciphers. Since then, the copy of his 2005 book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” (which he wrote under the byline “Jean Palmer”) I ordered has arrived… but is it any good?

(Incidentally, “agony columns”  in Victorian newspapers were originally for readers to post personal announcements and messages about/for missing friends and relatives: while “advice columns” (which became popular in the 1950s) were actually a continuation of an eighteenth century newspaper feature known as “letters to the lovelorn“, as well as the advice column in popular magazine “The Lady’s Monthly Museum”. All of which means that the phrase “agony aunt” is a kind of uneasy linguistic marriage between two quite different types of newspaper column.)

People liked the ability to leave messages in agony columns: but some,  wishing to remain anonymous, submitted their messages in code, in cipher, or in some other cryptic manner. Tony’s book collects together 1000 of these (simultaneously public and private) messages.

On the one hand, I can well appreciate the compositional agony of transcribing so many ciphertexts (which themselves may well have been scrambled by harried typesetters) and then trying to decipher them (which may not always be possible). I can also appreciate that a collection of these could well offer a nice commuter alternative to the sheer maddening pointlessness of Sudoku (oh look, all the numbers add up… and here’s my station).

On the other hand, who (apart from cipher history junkies such as me) would really connect with the content of such a project? Stripped of background, context, and outcome, the results are – if you go through your own agony of deciphering them – typically no more than fleeting half-scenes from lost Victorian soap operas, full of thwarted & hopeful love and clandestine meetings.

Structurally, the book comprises a series of dated cipher fragments sorted into chapters according to the newspaper in which they appeared (The Times, The Morning Chronicle/Observer, etc) and sorted by date, with a cipher key listed at the end for most (but not all) of the enciphered ones. All very logical and sequential as a reference work: but does it really work as a piece of cipher solving entertainment?

With my historical cryptography hat on, I’d say yes: the reader is presented with a cleaned up set of cipher transcriptions, with exactly as much information as a curious newspaper reader of the day would have had. It’s straightforward and clear, a nice little slice of cipher history.

But with my publisher hat on, I’d say no: as an editor, I would have discarded the merely cryptic, and rearranged the same material as a series of enciphered threads graded by difficulty, so that a commuter could engage with it as if it were a cipher puzzle-book. I’d also have opted for a larger page size, and included pre-printed solving grids and a sorted frequency count for all monoalphabetic ciphers.

(A fine example of this kind of cipher puzzle book is Elonka Dunin’s (2006) “The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”, which also briefly describes the Voynich Manuscript on pp. 489-493, as well as the Beale Papers, the Dorabella Cipher, the Zodiac Ciphers, and the Phaistos Disk).

I would also have moved all the (currently) unsolved ciphers to an end chapter, together with brief failed solving notes.

On balance, then, I’d say that the cipher historian side of me enjoyed the book, but the cipher puzzler side of me felt frustrated by its structure. However, because I would guess that cipher puzzlers outnumber cipher historians 100:1, perhaps it might be an idea for Tony to revisit this project, to Elonka-ify it?

“The Voynich Enigma” just released…

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Wah, looky heyuh – it’s another Voynich novel to add to my big fat list. Retired chemical industry R&D / sales guy Baz Cunningham will be signing copies of his third novel “The Voynich Enigma” next Saturday morning (15th Nov 2008) in New Martinsville, WV.

In the book, a couple of sharp-witted cousins find the key to the VMs on their West Virginia farm, before going head to head with an evil Mamluk chieftan in a cave in Provence as they try to reach a long-lost Templar treasure trove. If you like the sound of all that, a copy could be yours for $15 via the author’s pleasantly sparse website (though, errrrm, clicking on the PayPal button produced an error when I tried).

Also, the [contact-the-author] page says “put contact email here”, so I presume that’s a work-in-progress too. But when I do (finally) manage to get in contact with Baz, I’ll be sure to buy a copy & to post a review here, as per normal. *sigh*