The Society Hill Treasure Map…

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Jenny Kile has recently turned up an interesting item on her blog: a 1716 letter describing the location of buried treasure in Philadelphia, originally uncovered by Historical Society of Pennsylvania historian Daniel Rolph in around 1996 or so.

According to her commenter Buckeye Bob, though Jenny probably found it in a 2016 Philly Voice article, it was 2008 when the details first came out in an HSP blog entry. Though the original page is still there, it has mysteriously lost the image of the treasure map letter it once proudly displayed.

But no longer! Thanks to the Internet magic of the Wayback Machine, I was able to find a 2012 grab of the post including the image, and so here it is (click on it to see a much larger scan):

So (of course) here’s my first pass at a transcript:

Society Hill Treasure Map Transcript

(The main peculiarity of the spelling is the use of ‘u’ where we would now use ‘w’.)

01 – D[ea]r
02 – brother. Having said to you in my 2 Letters all that was nesisare it now
03 – remains that I give you the proper directions which is as followeth, V[i]z that
04 – at the South End of the town of Philadelphia is a Gutt of water with a few –
05 – Planks Layd over it which the Inhabitants call a drau Bridge: a little to ye
06 – Southward of that is a Rising Ground called Society Hill: upon which hill is
07 – a pretty good Brick house with one apple Orchard: But called Cherry Garden
08 – Observe at the front of the S[ai]d house which fronts the west is a porch :-
09 – Measure exactly 45 foot from that Porch along the lane due South
10 – there you will find a Stone post in the ground if not moved which may
11 – be easily done by accident or perhaps by makeing a Neu fence : 3 foot
12 – or perhaps 4 foot west from the s[ai]d stone is a Chist 4 and a half foot long 2 foot
13 – broad and half foot and the same depth accordingly being about 6 foot from the
14 – bottom of the Chist to the surface of the Ground. It contains 15 hundred peases of
15 – Silver or peases of Eight. So called and 4 times the fill of my hat in Rials and
16 – Double rials otterways Bit and double bits: and further contains 250 quadruple pistole
17 – peaces Comonly Caled Double Double Loans: perhaps ther may be a feu more or
18 – les: for time would not alou of ane exact reaconing
19 – N B: if you wil not folou my my Advice and go there with the first opportunity
20 – I order you Imediatly to burn this direction and both my Leters and send me
21 – a particular act and direct for me Exactly according to my direction. But Be
22 – sure to put the Leters in the post office and trust not to your Whistling acquaintances
23 – for I expect your Imediat answer
24 – St Jago de la Vigo in Jamaica
25 – May 14 1716
26 – PS: I have in my 2 letters to you Re[……..] actions you can make posibly

(Please feel free to suggest corrections and improved interpolations, I shall be happy to update the above accordingly. Thanks to John Comegys, James Comegys, milongal and Greg Stachowski for their corrections and comments [which I have incorporated], much appreciated!)

Finding The Treasure…

The various landmarks mentioned in the letter do make historical sense, according to the Philly Voice article:

[…] Philadelphia historian John Fanning Watson, who died in 1860, referenced the drawbridge, Cherry Garden and a “precipitous and high bank” in Society Hill in his 19th century manuscripts detailing the city’s history, Rolph said. The drawbridge and creek running along Dock Street are included on old maps, but by the 1680s – some three decades before the letter was written – many brick houses were being constructed in the area.

“I get the impression it had to have been buried many years before,” Rolph said. “By 1716, it was built up along the docks and all down that area.”

Moreover, professional treasure hunter Dennis Parada of Clearfield PA claims to have identified the exact location where the chest would be: “at one of two locations along Second Street between Spruce and Pine streets”.

The key problem is that there are all sorts of legal issues concerning treasure hunting in Philadelphia, so nobody is sure who would own the treasure if it were to be found. And so there seems to be little appetite for digging anything up to have a look, a process that might well destroy much but gain little.

All the same, it’s a great story, right? 🙂

Coming soon, a paper where the Voynich Manuscript meets Cushing’s Syndrome…

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I recently had a nice day out in Whitstable (marred only by a little light rain and a touch overhoneyed squid tempura dipping sauce, upstairs at the otherwise excellent Crab & Winkle Restaurant). I only mention this because Whitstable’s Wetherspoons – The Peter Cushing – is named after the famous British horror actor (who had a house in the town for many years), famous for playing Grand Moff Tarkin and vampire hunter Van Helsing. And so some people might suspect Cushing’s Syndrome to be a condition involving, say, irrational fear of vampires.

Alas no! In 1912, the same year that Wilfrid Voynich was (supposedly) buying his now eponymous manuscript, it was American brain surgeon Harvey Williams Cushing (1869-1939) who described his patient Minnie as suffering from hypercorticism, though he originally assumed that this was some kind of polyglandular disorder. By 1943, this was known to be “an endocrinological syndrome caused by malfunction of the pituitary gland”, and was named Cushing’s Syndrome in H. W. Cushing’s honour.

So: all distracting mentions of sanguivoriphobia aside, how does Cushing’s Syndrome present? “Symptoms include rapid weight gain, particularly of the trunk and face with sparing of the limbs (central obesity). Common signs include the growth of fat pads along the collarbone, on the back of the neck (“buffalo hump” or lipodystrophy), and on the face (“moon face”).” It is also far more common in adult women than in adult men.

This should be just about enough of a trigger for long-suffering Voynich researchers to work out precisely where this is all leading…

Alexander N. Gabrovsky, Ph.D

It is a certain Alexander N. Gabrovsky, who styles himself as a “Medieval Consultant“, who is about to have a paper published in the Spring 2018 issue of “Source: Notes in the History of Art” (Vol. 37 No. 3). This paper – “Galenic Humoral Theory and Amenorrhea: Cushingoid Phenotype in a Fifteenth Century Illustrated Cipher Manuscript,” – which he asserts will be “one of the first peer-reviewed art historical perspectives on the Voynich Manuscript” will surely link the Voynich Manuscript (specifically its preponderance of Voynich nymphs, almost certainly) to the way Cushing’s Syndrome typically presents.

With my Art History hat on, I’ll be interested to see whether or not the whole “Cushingoid Phenotype” was ever depicted in a recognisable way in the centuries before 1912: it would be a strange paper were it not to even pose that question.

Gabrovsky describes himself as…

“[…]an American medievalist and hold a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (England), specializing in medieval literature, alchemical manuscripts, paleopathology (study of ancient diseases), history of art, Chaucer, and history of the occult sciences from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.”

Tom Juzek on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers…

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A few days ago, German cryptoblogger Klaus Schmeh mentioned a recent paper by Tom Juzek on the unsolved Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher. This first appeared in March/April 2018, but I was not aware of it before Klaus flagged it.

Juzek’s MSD metric

The metric Juzek uses to drive much of his argumentation is what he calls ‘MSD’ (“Mean Squared Distance”), which is simply the sum of the squares of the instance frequencies of bigrams (or trigrams), but then divided by the number of individual bigrams (or trigrams).

As an example, the 14-letter text “AAAAAAAAAABCD” is made up of thirteen bigram instances AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AA, AB, BC, and CD. Hence it contains 9 x AA, 1 x AB, 1 x BC, and 1 x CD: and so would have a bigram MSD of (9*9 + 1*1 + 1*1 + 1*1) / 13 = (84 / 13) = 6.46.

The same text contains twelve trigram instances AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAA, AAB, ABC, and BCD. Hence it contains 8 x AAA, 1 x AAB, 1 x ABC, and 1 x BCD: and so would have a trigram MSD of (8*8 + 1*1 + 1*1 + 1*1) / 12 = 5.58.

However, Juzek quickly flags that this raw metric is not really good enough on its own:

The problem with the msd is that there are difficulties with comparing msd’s across data sets. This is because the length of a text influences the msd, as well as the length of a text’s character set. A 400 character cipher using 10 characters will see a different ngram distribution to a 100 character cipher using 40 characters.

Hence Juzek instead generates a “delta MSD”, which he defines as the difference between the ngram MSD of each ciphertext read horizontally (i.e. the generally presumed ‘correct’ symbol ordering) and the ngram MSD of its vertical transposition (i.e. every 17th character). This is to try to ‘normalize’ the raw MSD against a kind of statistically flattened version of the same.

Juzek then applies these two final metrics (bigram delta MSD and trigram delta MSD) to a number of real and fake ciphers, before concluding that the Z340 is quite unlike the Z408, and that it in fact presents more like fake ciphers than real ciphers.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Clearly, Juzek’s motivation for squaring ngram instance counts at all is to try to somehow ‘reward’ ngrams that are repeated in a given text being tested. Unfortunately, I think this is no more than a rather clunky and misleading way of looking at entropy / negentropy, which has a long-established and rigorous calculation procedure (and an enormous theoretical literature ranging across Computer Science and indeed Physics).

As a result, I think he may well have reinvented a perfectly round wheel in a somewhat square format: sorry, but I don’t think this is going to roll very far or very fast.

If the same calculations were repeated with different order ngram entropies, I think we might have something more interesting to work with here: but that’s already been done to death in the Zodiac Killer research world.

Moreover, the long-standing suggestion (which I think has a fair amount of evidential support) that the Z340 may well have been constructed in two distinct halves (Z170A and Z170B) would also mess with just about all of his arguments and conclusions. I’d much rather have seen that tested than Vigenere (it’s not a Vig, not even close).

Forward Context vs Backward Context?

As I was reading through Juzek’s paper, I was struck by a quite different question. If we are looking at an encrypted homophonic English ciphertext (a fairly reasonable assumption here), is there a notable difference between the left-context entropy (i.e. the information content of the text using the preceding letter as a context for predicting the next letter) with the right-context entropy?

That is, might encrypted homophonic English ciphertexts have a distinctly asymmetrical statistical “fingerprint” that would give us confidence that this is indeed what we are looking at in the Z340? Perhaps this has already been calculated: if so, it’s not work that I’m aware of, so please leave a comment here to help broaden my mind. 🙂

Cipher Mysteries comments now online, plus Pameo Pose Voynich apparel…

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Just a short note to let you know that Cipher Mysteries’ website’ comment facility is (hopefully) now working again. I had configured it to use an anti-spam WordPress plugin called Mollom, which had its support withdrawn on 2nd April 2018: and so since then all comments to the site had been mysteriously rejected. Thanks to Mark, Rene and others for flagging this issue to me.

More generally, since early least month I’ve been tied up trying to resolve a number of non-crypto (i.e. real-life) issues, so please accept my apologies if you have found both the website and me to have been less responsive than normal. =:-o

Pameo Pose’s Voynich apparel

In the meantime, here is a selection of Voynich apparel from Japanese company Pameo Pose.

Firstly, a Voynich EVA ‘P’ themed beret, which comes in cream and tan (though both variants are sold out). Note that they have chosen the crossed-through single leg gallows from the EVA alphabet, which (of course) means that the ‘c’ and ‘h’ either side are missing:

Secondly, a Voynich lace collar, though I guess you would only be able to tell that it is EVA close-up. It also comes in two colours, and is sold out (I prefer the funky ear-rings, myself):

Thirdly, a Voynich lace dress, a snip at 33480 yen:

Finally (and my favourite of the lot) is the Voynich dance team top, which uses the well-formed EVA ‘cPh’ as its logo:

The “Liber de Angelis” and the Voynich Manuscript’s planet sequence…

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Thanks to a nice post on Marco Ponzi’s website, a new block paradigm candidate has presented itself: the short “Liber de Angelis”, the first eleven paragraphs of Cambridge University Library MS Dd.xi.45.

As Marco notes, this was transcribed and translated by Juris G. Lidaka in a chapter in Claire Fanger’s (1998) “Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Late Medieval Ritual Magic“. (The full treatise, which is undoubtedly a collection of smaller treatises, is called “Liber de Angelis, Annulis, Karecteribus et Ymaginibus Planetarum”.)

“The Experiment”

Incidentally, this collection has the distinction of having been mentioned by the writer M.R.James in his story “The Experiment: A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story“, first published in the Morning Post, December 31, 1931 (as discussed here). Republished in “A Pleasing Terror”, p.402 refers to “Bishop Moore’s book of recipes”
James’ story concludes:

Bishop Moore’s book of recipes is now in the University Library at Cambridge, marked Dd 11, 45, and on the leaf numbered 144 this is written:

An experiment most ofte proved true, to find out tresure hidden in the ground, theft, manslaughter, or anie other thynge. Go to the grave of a ded man, and three tymes call hym by his nam at the hed of the grave, and say. Thou, N., N., N., I coniure the, I require the, and I charge the, by thi Christendome that thou takest leave of the Lord Raffael and Nares and then askest leave this night to come and tell me trewlie of the tresure that lyith hid in such a place. Then take of the earth of the grave at the dead bodyes hed and knitt it in a lynnen clothe and put itt under thi right eare and sleape theruppon: and wheresoever thou lyest or slepest, that night he will corn and tell thee trewlie in waking or sleping.

However, given that we are not presently concerned with asking the dead for advice about treasure hunting, I leave this merely as an aside / exercise for the reader. 😉

What we are actually concerned with is whether the eleven paragraphs of the Liber de Angelis might somehow be the plaintext of a section of the Voynich Manuscript: so, without any further ado, here they are (as transcribed by Lidaka)…

Liber de Angelis

[1] Signum admirabile experimentorum dixit Messayaac & incipit cum adiuncto Altissimi & est mirabile signum & ualde admirandum in quo sunt secreta Altissimi. Per illud autem ludei operabantur, Caldei, Egipcij, & prudentes Babilonici. Cum igitur operare uolueris, fiat annulus Solis, ex auro fiat, in quo scribantur carecter & nomen angeli solis. & hoc annulus habeatur in omni sacrificio super minore digito sinister manus. Cartam itaque cum mente curiose & studiose custodire in loco mundissimo, & inuolue in rubeo serico.
[2] & hec sunt opera annulus Solis. Cum itaque secundum annulum Solis die dominice ieiunes usque ad noctem, nocte autem facies sacrificium de quada aue non domestica prope litus aque decurrentis, & cum eiusdem auis sanguine scribe carecter & nomen angeli Solis in carta uirginea, & hanc tecum porta. Et cum uolueris transire de vna terra in alteram, depinge in terra carecter Solis & nomen angeli eius, & statim veniet equus niger qui portabit te vbicumque uolueris. Tene tamen cartam in manu dextera & annulum in manu sinistra.
[3] Sicus prius, habeas carecter & nomen angeli eius & scribantur in annulo, & ieiunes in die Lune quo fit annulus Lune, sicud fecisti in annulo Solis, in quo si operare uolueris continuo, sacrificabis anguillam flumalem, cuius sanguine scribe carecter Lune & nomen angeli eius in pelle tue, & inuolue in pelle anguille & reserua vt cum volueris ut appareat flumen uel arbor cum fructu, scribe in terra nomen angeli & nomen fructus, & uoca angelum carta aperta, & apparebit, Si uis ut non appareat, claude cartam.
[4] De annulo Martis. Fiat sacrificium de aue rapaci intra domum ad ignem, et scribe cum eiusdem sanguine in pelle eiusdem nomen angeli & carecteris. Et cum uolueris ut appareant milites armati uel castella uel lubricus ludus, uel ut vincas in prelio, fac caracterem & nomen angeli in terra & appari cartam & apparebit & faciet que preceperis, & cum clauditur carta recedet & cessabit.
[5] Totum fac ut de alijs, sacrificium fiat de uulpe uel de cato in loco deserto, scribe careterem et nomen angeli in fronte – vinces in omni placito. Tene cartam in manu.
[6] Fac sacrificium de gallo, karetter & nomen angeli scribe in pelle, intelligi, in quo inuoluas denarium, & qociens ipsum donaueris reuertetur.
[7] Fac sacrificium de columba alba viuente, carecterem & nomen angeli eius scribe in pelle leporis, quod si mulieri ostenderis sequentur te uelociter.
[8] Totum ut supra. [Damage to leaf has left a small section unreadable here.] Sacrificium de capra inter vepres, carecterem & nomen angeli scribe in percameno veteri. Cum uolueris inter duos odium mittere, eorum nomina in percameno, codem carecterem & nomen angeli in pelle capre, ut predicatur. Cum uolueris aliquem intoxicare, in eius potu intinge annulum Saturni: cum idem potauerit intoxicabitur.
[9] Nunc de generalibus mandatis restat docere. Annulus Solis in omni sacrificio habeatur, & annulus Febe, in quo nomen angeli ipsius; Febe tam in memoria habeatur quam in opera. & fiat sacrificium in circulo infundali, prius scriptus carecter, & in medio magister dicat: ‘Oya, sacrificium tue laudis suscipe’, proiciens carnes extra circulum. In qualibet autem operacione, nomen angeli inuocetur & annulus in digito habeatur. Carte uero mundissime reseruentur, nec in noctis tenebris aperiantur nisi operis necessario ingrauerit.
[10] Nunc de annulis. Annulus Solis ad equum & fiet de auro. Annulus Lune ex argento ad fluuium. Annulus Martis ex ere ad uictoriam in bello. Annulus Mercurij ex cupro ad scienciam. Annulus Iouis ex electro ad denarium. Annulus Veneris ex plumbo ad amorem. Annulus Saturni ex ferre ad odium. Annulus Capitis Draconis ex calibe ad toxicandum.
[11] Hox signum mirabile est experimentum magistri Messayaac de secretis spirituum planetis, secundum mencionem, & sumitur sic. Omitto nomina angelorum cum carecteribus suis (que incipiunt sic: Storax, Abamecta, Paymon, cum ceteris) propter certam causam hic scribenda.

It’s Not by Osbern Bokenham

Though it was once thought to have been written down by Augustinian poet-monk Osbern Bokenham, Lidaka dismisses this quickly. But as a nice point of history, Osbern Bokenham did once conceal his identity in the chapter initial letters (much as in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) as discussed here:

On 1st May 1456 he wrote Dialogue betwixt a secular asking and a Frere (friar) answering at the grave of Dame Joan of Acre. This is a very important source for the history of Clare Priory. This manuscript, which still exists, is written in both Latin and English, and richly decorated on parchment. Another of his works was called Mappula Anglicae, which covered the rhymed lives of English saints such as Cedde, Felix and Oswald.

It contained seventeen chapters, and was anonymous, except that Bokenham stated that, if taken in sequence, the first letter in each chapter spelt out the name of the author. It reads OSBERNUS BOKEN_HAM. Chapter 15 is missing.

[Yes, it does indeed look from that as though it was actually Chapter 14 that was missing, but let’s not quibble.]

It’s Actually by William Bokenham

Though the surname of the Liber de Angelis writer was clearly Bokenham, Lidaka points out that the author’s first name was William, and that he was copying various small treatises, not composing them. Moreover, given that two works dealing with urine (that most multispectral of medieval medical staples) by a William Bokenham are in Wellcome MS 408, and that in them he claimed to be “a doctor with a degree from Bologna” as well as “a monk at Norwich Holy Trinity (or St Giles)”, we would seem to have our copyist locked down quite solidly.

From internal evidence (the ‘Oya’ in paragraph #9), Lidaka suggests that the Liber de Angelis version being copied may well have been derived from an earlier French language version: and separately that the ultimate source of at least some of the tracts could perhaps be Arabic. In which case, it might be a good idea to get acquainted with David Pingree’s “The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe” (Ladaka’s note #14). [Jim Reeds is also mentioned in note #20, crypto-history fans.]

Personally, I’m also a little suspicious of the “karetter” in paragraph #6 as being a possible linguistic tell.

And Now We’ve Done All That…

…I’ll compare this with the Voynich Manuscript’s planets in a follow-on post, 1300 words is quite enough for the moment. 🙂

Wagamama “Edamam(e) = mc2” cipher competition deadline fast approaching…

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Following on from the Oxford Mail’s brief article I covered here a few days ago, here’s yer akshual Wagamama press release, courtesy of those upstart challenger funsters at Talker Tailor Trouble Maker who put the competition together for their Japanese/Asian food-selling clients:

Mark Knowles has also sent me through A4 scans of the A3-sized entry form / paper placemat direct from Oxford (which was very kind of him): but given that we now have the proper press release to refer to (and hence know for sure that the string of numbers in the Oxford Mail was correct), and also know that Rene Z has figured the answer out, I think anyone wanting to enter will just have to drop by, fill in an entry form, and drop it in the box all on their own.

“Give Us A Clue” *sigh*

People keep asking me for clues to the mathematical bit: however, all I can reasonably say for that is that you should tighten your girdle, prime your weapons, and keep on marching through, you’ll get there in the end. It’s a fact! Or maybe not. 🙂

As for the anagram stage, I think that Wagamama may have been stretching the notion of what counts as “topical” a little further than you may at first think, so perhaps try to expand your view somewhat. 😉

Good luck! And if you do happen to win the £500 gift voucher, don’t forget to invite me round for some edamame beans. 😉

Wagamama’s “impossible” 7-day cipher…

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According to this rehash of a press release hard-hitting article from this week’s Oxford Mail that Cipher Mysteries reader ‘LV’ kindly sent me:

A NEWLY refurbished Oxford restaurant is offering brainy punters six months free food – if they can crack an ‘impossible code’.

Wagamama in George Street has appealed for people to take on a complex equation to be in with a chance of bagging a voucher worth £500.

The competition is being launched today, Albert Einstein’s birthday, and is open until 10pm on March 21.

It’s just a little bit of a shame that Stephen Hawking happened to expire on the very same day, otherwise I’m sure all the papers would be talking about is Wagamama’s clever cipher. Oh, and as you’ll see, it’s clearly not a “complex equation” in any useful sense of the word, so please try not to get too taken in by the allusions to the wonders of maths in what follows.

Set by an Oxford University mathematician, the puzzle is as follows:

Each number below encodes a letter of the alphabet. When you’ve worked out the letters, you’ll need to unscramble them to make three topical words.

330 33 2 105 55 10 2 2 70 2 105 14 42 11 2 10 154 2 11 70 30 2 70

To enter visit Wagamama’s Oxford branch and pick up a form.

Essentially, the way this is supposed to work is that once the deadline passes, the puzzle-setter stops snickering into the back of his/her Oxonian hand long enough to reveal the trick behind the letter-to-number mapping, at which point we all kick ourselves for not seeing the trick. Arguably, this is more steganography than cryptography, but it’s a bit of fun nonetheless, right? Better than turn-of-the-century lovers’ pigpen postcards, wouldn’t you say, eh?

Some Quick Thoughts

Firstly… as a starting point, the unique numbers and their instance repetitions in the cryptogram are:

10 10
105 105
11 11
14
154
2 2 2 2 2 2 2
30
33
330
42
55
70 70 70

Secondly, it’s seems fairly obvious that (as I flagged above) this probably isn’t some mathematical equation-based thing, but rather some trick that maps numbers onto the letters of the alphabet (for you to then anagrammify). Similar ciphers I’ve seen in the past have converted Morse Code letters into numbers (e.g. SOS = … — … = 3 8 3, etc i.e. where 12345 = ./../…/…./….. and 67890 = -/–/—/—-/—–), or have converted a Braille pattern into a binary number, or have yielded a grid position: but there’s surely tons of room for ACA-style fans to devise new letter-to-number puzzle mappings. For instance, you could map AEIOUY = 123456, and then add a digit counting forward from that vowel, e.g. ABCDEF = 10 11 12 13 20 21 (etc), and so forth.

What is a little unusual about Wagamama’s particular numbers is that there are no sixes, eights, or nines, as well as the way so many end in 0: while the cluster of 30 / 33 / 330 also seems to offer some kind of blatantly obvious clue (in retrospect, next week some time) as to the nature of the system, not too dissimilar to the clue (supposedly) hidden in the microdot in the ‘i’ in Arnold Rimmer’s swimming certificate.

Thirdly, the seven instances of ‘2’ would normally make it highly likely to be E or T (the highest frequency letters in English): but given that “EINSTEIN” seems a bit too obvious, perhaps “WAGAMAMA” is one of the “three topical words”, making ‘2’ instead ‘A’. This is normally the kind of half-hearted joke that tends to amuse PR flacks sitting in wine bars (and what are the odds this was 1855 Oxford?), but you probably guessed that already: it’s not as if they would have used a properly topical word like “NOVICHOK”, right?

Finally, just about the only Cipher Mysteries reader in Oxford able to pick up a form is Mark Knowles: I just hope he likes cracking puzzles and Japanese-inspired Asian-esque fusion food. 😉

Update: well, I’ve now solved the letter-to-number correspondence stage, which in fact is mathematical, though (as I predicted above) not really in anything like a “complex equation” sense. (Does anyone want a hint? Unlike President Snowball, I’m not really into spoilers, and you’ll enjoy it more if you work it out for yourself.) I’ve also worked out one of the three words (which, again, was as I predicted above: WAGAMAMA), so all I have to do is work out the other two “topical words”, neither of which is EINSTEIN, unless they cocked the puzzle up… 😉

Perhaps the worst Rohonc Codex book ever written…

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Until such time as the sun burns out and/or the Kardashians are no longer celebrities, the Internet will continue to be littered by clickbait gosh-wow pages claiming to list the top [insert number here] cipher mysteries. And of the unsolved ciphers these typically include, probably the least known is the Rohonc Codex.

And so I decided a few days ago to go looking for a definitive book on the Rohonc Codex. After all the years the Rohonc Codex has spent under the world wide web’s spotlight, one such book must surely have come out by now, right?

Well… wrong, actually. But regardless, I thought I ought to flag two of the books I did find, purely as some kind of blogtastic public service…

The second worst Rohonc Codex book ever

In this digital printing age, it turns out that there are a number of groups of people who rip articles out of Wikipedia (often by the hundred or even thousand) and market them as ebooks and/or POD (“print on demand” books). In the case of BetaScript Publishing, their Rohonc Codex book is entitled (unsurprisingly) “Rohonc Codex”; is 120 pages long (though my guess is that most of those are generic filler); is one of some 5000+ titles churned out by the company; and is priced at a splutter-worthy 28.99 euros.

In the absence of any clear scenario where parasitic non-books like this are genuinely a good idea for someone somewhere (and not just a scam), all I can do is advise you that rubbish this bad really does exist, in the hope that you don’t buy it.

Besides, if you do have money burning a hole in your pocket that you’re desperate almost beyond measure to spend on something utterly pointless and yet marginally Rohonc Codex-related, there is another book out there that arguably offers less value than this…

The worst Rohonc Codex book ever

As you doubtless know, digital publishing platforms have allowed a vast number of completely baseless and zero-merit theories about cipher mysteries to emerge into the sunlight of Amazon.com’s virtual repository. All the same, I must confess that even I wasn’t quite ready for the 156-page “Rohonc Codex: English Translation Paperback” (2011), courtesy of Linnaeus Hoffmann Publishing and “Mr Dicky Maloney (Author),‎ Mr Kenneth Grahame (Author),‎ Mr Bernie Douglas (Introduction)”. Yes, the very same “Mr Kenneth Grahame” who died in 1932.

For it turns out that:

The Rohonc Codex is a Twelfth Century Hungarian text, written in a language, that until this very day, has not been translated by anyone else. Not a single word. And then Dicky Maloney painstakingly translated this text, word for word. As it turns out, by pure coincidence, it is Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, word for word.

And here’s the cover, which is in the same general vein:

Now OK, it’s obviously just a joke: and Linnaeus Hoffman Publishing’s other book (also from 2011) was “The Stickwick Staplers”, a marginally satirical opus from which you can read a small chunk (which probably is as much as is safe for anyone not wearing a hazmat suit and ten-layer blindfold to digest) courtesy of Amazon’s Look Inside (Before Sticking Your Fingers Down Your Throat) feature. I’d normally say “Enjoy!” here, but on this occasion I’m not sure I can bring myself to. 🙁

However, I was kind of impressed by the way that (the now-defunct) www.linnaeushoffman.com website had only a single entry in the Wayback Machine (from January 2013), a snapshot which contained not even a single webpage: this would seem to have been a successful attempt to construct an entirely unseen corner of the Internet.

It is of course conceivable that “Rohonc Codex: English Translation Paperback” will turn out to be a book industry ‘sleeper’, an unbelievably splendiferous secret hit so beloved by Those Opinion-Makers Who Know (And Indeed Define) What Is Hip And Cool that it has been continuously optioned by every major Hollywood film producer since 2011, whose attempts to bring it to the silver screen have been thwarted solely by the book’s unfilmable brio. But I suspect the odds are somewhat against that scenario. 🙁

Then again, it’s not widely known that Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” received terrible reviews when it first appeared blinking into the hostile light of day in 1908. It was only unexpected plaudits from US President Theodore Roosevelt that helped make it popular: almost nobody else at the time saw its merits. So who am I to judge a book that I can’t buy or even download (and which I expect was never actually printed)?

“Cold Case Files 1: The Zodiac” (2003)…

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If you like cold case documentaries with only a mere frisson of cryptography, “Cold Case Files 1: The Zodiac” (which was recently uploaded to the TagTele site) could well be for you. While it’s an oldie (first released way back in 2003), it doesn’t try to impose any theories, but concentrates on interviewing people who were actually there… well, up to timecode 25:40, anyway, when it suddenly goes into ‘Arthur Leigh Allen = prime suspect’ mode (but then constantly bangs on about how he almost certainly wasn’t the Zodiac). Which is nice.

video since removed from TagTele site

What I wasn’t expecting was that – quite the opposite from what you might think from 2017’s documentary crop on the History Channel (which is an anagram, not many people know, of Clannish Theory, Shithole Cranny, and Horny Chatlines) – the police had actually worked through lots of the Zodiac DNA evidence by 2002. In the video, the specifically DNA-based angle (which starts at about timecode 33:25) shows that when DNA from Arthur Leigh Allen’s preserved brain was compared with the best reference samples derived from Zodiac primary evidence, it was enough to exclude him from being the Zodiac Killer.

Moreover, the documentary also discussed “writer’s palm” (from about 36:50 onwards), which is the imprint left by someone’s palm as they write a document. What it revealed (which I didn’t know) was that the palm prints police forensically recovered from Zodiac letters were good enough to compare with palm prints taken from Arthur Leigh Allen: all of which also proved that he was not the Zodiac Killer.

Of course, while it sounds ever so intriguing that Arthur Leigh Allen had a Zodiac watch, he was actually a scuba diver, and that was basically who Zodiac watches got marketed at. As an aside, I do wonder if the police ever looked at SF scuba clubs of the period: that may have been more of a productive avenue to explore than the American Cryptogram Association. Ah well. :-/

Incidentally, if you want to see a young-looking Tom Voigt, he’s in the documentary from about timecode 40:15, with the voiceover saying that his website gets a million hits per month (back in 2003). Goodness knows how much traffic it must get now, blimey. :-/