The d’Agapeyeff Cipher once again…

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As is well known, Alexander d’Agapeyeff’s 1939 challenge cipher looks like this:-

75628 28591 62916 48164 91748 58464 74748 28483 81638 18174
74826 26475 83828 49175 74658 37575 75936 36565 81638 17585
75756 46282 92857 46382 75748 38165 81848 56485 64858 56382
72628 36281 81728 16463 75828 16483 63828 58163 63630 47481
91918 46385 84656 48565 62946 26285 91859 17491 72756 46575
71658 36264 74818 28462 82649 18193 65626 48484 91838 57491
81657 27483 83858 28364 62726 26562 83759 27263 82827 27283
82858 47582 81837 28462 82837 58164 75748 58162 92000

Almost all cryptanalyses of this ciphertext start from the reasonable observation that (a) this is dominated by number-pairs of the form [6/7/8/9/0][1.2.3.4.5], and that (b) these pairs have a very strongly language-like distribution:-

** .1 .2 .3 .4 .5
6. _0 17 12 16 11
7. _1 _9 _0 14 17
8. 20 17 15 11 17
9. 12 _3 _2 _1 _0
0. _0 _0 _0 _1 _0

To simplify discussion (and ignoring the issue of fractionation for the moment), we can assign these structured number pairs to letters in an obvious sort of order, e.g.:-

** .1 .2 .3 .4 .5
6. _A _B _C _D _E
7. _F _G _H _I _J
8. _K _L _M _N _O
9. _P _Q _R _S _T
0. _U _V _W _X _Y

In which case, the rather less verbose version of the same ciphertext would look like this:-

J B L O P B P D K D P I O N D I I L N M
K C K K I I L B D J M L N P J I E M J J
J R C E E K C K J O J J D B L Q O I C L
J I M K E K N O D O D O O C L G B M B K
K G K D C J L K D M C L O K C C C X I K
P P N C O N E D O E B S B B O P O P I P
G J D E J F E M B D I K L N B L D P K R
E B D N N P M O I P K E G I M M O L M D
B G B E B M J Q G C L L G G M L O N J L
K M G N B L M J K D J I O K B Q - - - -

Cryptanalytically, the problem with this as a ciphertext is that, even discounting the ’00’ filler-style characters at the end, it simply has too many doubled (and indeed tripled) letters to be simple English: 11 doublets, plus 2 additional triplets. Hence the chance of any given letter in this text being followed by itself within this text is 15/195 ~= 7.7%, while the chance of any given letter being followed by itself twice more is 2/194 ~= 1.03%.

According to my spreadsheet, if the letters were jumbled randomly, the chances of the same letter appearing twice in a row would be 7.44% (very slightly less than what we see, but still broadly the same), while the chances of the same letter appearing three times in a row would 0.594% (quite a lot less).

It struck me that these statistics might possibly be what we might expect to see for texts formed of every second or every third letter of English. So, I decided to test this notion with some brief tests on Moby Dick:-

Distance – doubles – triples
1 – 3.693% – 0.075%
2 – 4.426% – 0.275%
3 – 5.994% – 0.476%
4 – 6.289% – 0.466%
5 – 6.682% – 0.566%
6 – 6.491% – 0.546%
7 – 6.372% – 0.508%
8 – 6.536% – 0.533%
9 – 6.544% – 0.536%
n – 6.524% – 0.525% (i.e. predicted percentages based purely on frequency counts)

Indeed, what we see is that the probability of a triple letter occurring in the actual text starts very low (0.075%), but rises to close to the raw probability (from pure frequency counts) at a distance of about 5 (i.e. A….B….C….D…. etc).

So, comparing the actual triple letter count in the ciphertext with the ciphertext’s raw frequencies would seem to suggest a transposition step of about 2 is active, whereas comparing the double count in the ciphertext with the ciphertext’s raw frequencies would seem to suggest a transposition step of about 5 is active.

Yes, I know that this looks a bit paradoxical: but it is what is. Still workin’ on it…

Somerton Man – video update, and political football latest…

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The Somerton Man case crawls ever on, with talk of DNA swirling ever round in its own eternal double-helix – one strand being what Derek Abbott wants, the other being what he’s ever likely to get.

Most of the current DNA chitter-chatter was sparked by the recent 60 Minutes episode on the Somerton Man. This has just had a 4-minute video update put on the web, though sadly (and as if to demonstrate how little traditional broadcasters understand about newmedia) without extra footage of two huge-eyed kittens playing adorably with a ball of string with L337-speak subtitles saying “WE HAS OWNED THA UNKNONE MAN”. Don’t these fools know anything about YouTube?

Instead, we got what some might describe as the next best thing: Roma and Rachel Egan being interviewed in the South Australian Police Museum with an ancient stiff cursed with distorted and unrepresentative facial features. Oh, and the Somerton Man’s plaster cast was also there, but you saw that joke coming a mile off. 😉

Of course, the real reason the clip had ended up on the (virtual) cutting room floor was that it didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know from the rest of the footage. But you didn’t really need me to tell you that, I’m sure.

In other news, I was a little surprised to find out that the Somerton Man has somehow developed a new life as a political football. According to a news story in The Adelaide Advertiser a few weeks back…

Shadow attorney-general Stephen Wade has given a strong hint that the Liberals, if elected in March, would dig up the body of the mystery man found dead on Somerton Beach on December 1, 1948.

“Any incoming Liberal attorney-general would need to be briefed on the matter, but my reading of the case is it’s just the sort of case the exhuming processes are designed for,” he said.

“On the one hand it’s a cold case and on the other hand it involves issues of paternity.”

So, it would seem that the Somerton Man is now such an iconic Aussie issue that votes are riding on his back. I didn’t see that coming… but there it is, make of it all what you will.

I don’t know… perhaps I’m being a bit thick here, but it still seems to me that an awful lot of DNA analysis should be done on the living before exhumation of the Unknown Man was even remotely considered.

If I was Attorney-General John Rau (and I’m not, before I get any Tamam Trolls suggesting otherwise), I’d want (and would indeed expect) any such request to be accompanied by a big fat dossier of familial genetic analysis, rather than just a fishing rod. Hence the Tamam Shud question that’s constantly hanging in the air here at Cipher Mysteries Mansions is simply this: “Where is that dossier?“

A Sirius Voynich Theory, I’ll be Dogon!

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Hillary Raimo has something big to smile about: a few weeks ago she got to spend some time with the Voynich Manuscript (assuming those Beinecke curators didn’t cheekily swap it for Klaus Schmeh’s prop version), taking 600 photos in preparation for writing an article to be published in a French magazine in 2014:-

hillary-raimo-at-the-beinecke-cropped

She has also been adding Voynich-related articles to her blog The Yin Factor, including a new one that explains her idea of how the Voynich Manuscript is tied in with the Dogon tribe’s ‘Nommo’ gods. In case you don’t know, the Nommo are hermaphrodite amphibians from the binary star Sirius, giving them “the best of both worlds” in just about every permutation of the phrase.

She starts her piece with a long quote from Jason King’s “The Cannabible III” (summarizing the whole Dogon / Sirius mythology thing popularized in Robert Temple’s (1976) The Sirius Mystery). However, her view goes much further: that the manuscript “traces the star map of human origins. Through the plants harvested from them.” Essentially, she thinks that naturally occurring DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) in cannabis was brought here from Sirius (along with the human race), and that the Voynich Manuscript is one of the documents that can magnificently reconnect us to the raw ancestral (and interstellar) reality we moderns are so divorced from.

Raimo is also fascinated by the apparent occurrence of the Pleiades in the Voynich Manuscript (on f68r3), a featurette that has already inspired several generations of Voynich theorists (perhaps most notably Robert Teague, P. Han, etc), though this doesn’t seem to be anything to do with Sirius. (Incidentally, the Voynich-Pleiades connection also has a modern fan-base in the form of Wayne Herschel, Michelle L. Hanks, etc.)

Of course, there may be some problems here both with Raimo’s evidence and with her conclusions.

If I were a rich junkie burning my way through an inheritance and I really, really wanted to know where to find a type of cannabis that had a natural lychee and guava aftertaste, The Cannabible series of books is probably the first place I’d go. However, as a source of historical information it seems decidedly unsatisfactory, particularly where it credulously quotes Robert Temple’s work on the Dogon tribe.

Moreover, my own opinion on Temple’s book on the Dogon is that it is an historical crock, based as it is upon Marcel Griaule’s ethnologically crocked research. And if you want a good summary of why that was crocked, I suggest you read Michael Heiser’s long-ish 2011 web-page on the subject.

Do I therefore think that there is the remotest possibility that there is a star map of the Nommo-esque origins of the human race / cannabis hidden in the Voynich Manuscript? Errrm… no, not really, sorry. But please feel free to form your own opinion.

The Voynich Manuscript – the Internet speaks its mind!

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So there’s this really old manuscript, it’s in Harvard or M.I.T., and it was discovered in 1812 (though Wikipedia says “1712”) by Wilfrid Voynitch who like doesn’t even know his own name because my spell-checker keeps suggesting “Wilfred” and that’s like totes annoying when you’re trying to tweet with predictive texting and that. So I don’t trust him, and he was a chemist and invented LSD or maybe Spanish fly while he was still young: and he really could have forged the manuscript because he had a moustache and that’s always like an awesomely bad sign in films, almost as bad as a British accent. But he couldn’t have don’t that because he didn’t even know his own name so was like completely stupid or something.

And people think the manuscript is really shocking ancient wisdom or alien DNA technology from the future but we’ll have to wait for the right person to time-travel back from meeting Roger Bacon in the past before we can read it. In fact, all the TV documentaries on the Voynitch manuscript start voice-over sentences with “Could it be that…” which is film-maker code that means that they know the real answers for sure but have been paid off with premium bond money not to tell.

Of course, it’s in code AND cipher AND shorthand AND microdots AND invisible ink AND tattooed on a slave-girl’s shaved head, and it’s secretly in a lost language that only alchemists can speak when they’re really, really close to creating the Philosopher’s Stonewashed Jeans and high on ergot and caffeinated beverages and fluoride, which are all poisons that completely surrounds us, there’s a whole alt.science newsgroup about that, everyone knows that the government scientists cover it up, worse than the cigarette makers. As if we can’t see through their lies, they’re so stupid, haha.

And anyone who says that Leonardo da Vinci wrote the manuscript is like so totally right, if you look at his notebooks there’s a helicopter and a bicycle and a T-1000 default form and he was writing in like mirror writing but he wasn’t using a mirror because they hadn’t been invented yet, duh. But it can’t actually have been Leonardo because there’s like lots of pictures of naked women in it and he was a gay vegetarian genius or something and that would have messed with his mind too much so he would have like imploded instantly.

But the real problem is that nobody wants to solve the Voynitch because it’s too much fun just pushing the numbers around and drawing graphs and infographics and stuff and they’re like getting paid by the hour by the CIA not to solve it so the economics are giving them the wrong financial incentive. Which means that they’re all getting rich on the back of us ordinary Internet surfers, especially that Cipher Mysteries guy who has like a Rolls Royce just for driving the mile down the drive to the gate of his mansion. He’s so rich, he pays the xkcd guy to draw stuff badly so nobody believes him when he tells the truth about stuff.

So I kind of met this guy on a mailing list who had solved the Voynitch and was about to publish his solution on the Internet but like the Men In Black burnt his house down and reduced him to a quivering empty shell of his former self, just like he was on crystal meth, except he swore he wasn’t (and I believe him). Worst thing is that they hypnotized him so that he couldn’t say the letter ‘c’ and it turns out that that is really important to the Voynitch’s secret secrets – people keep calling it the “Voynich Manuscript” but that’s because they can’t spell and that’s basically really annoying and stuff.

And anyway it turns out the answers are all in the Vatican Secret Archives which aren’t really “secret” they’re just called that to distract attention from the real secret archives which are in a bomb-proof basement two miles underneath Fatima in Portugal. But the really important stuff they put in the Secret Archives because nobody who knows how it all really works would think to look there, so it’s a huge double-bluff. The Catholic Church has been like that since 760 B.C., apparently they had to invent Christ because they had started 760 years Before something important beginning with “C” and the only word they could think of back then was “Christ”. And all the secrets of the early church are written in the Voynitch manuscript because that’s exactly where you’d hide something so dangerous it could bring the whole Church down. And that would cause real continuity problems for when TV repeat old episodes of the Simpsons with Ned Flanders in.

Only problem is that the Voynich is all definitely a hoax because if you have the right set of tables it has been scientifically proved you can write sentences that look just like peer-reviewed science, and then people will fund you to write whatever nonsense you fancy about anything you like. A bit like how Leonardo got paid to sit around and design butch-looking techno weapons even though he was a pacifist and the contradiction might make his brain explode. People don’t understand that the Voynitch is all about plant RNA and stimulating harmonics in your brain waves, you try reading it out loud you might become a genius or your own head might explode too just like Leonardo’s nearly did, nobody knows, that’s why it’s so dangerous and kept under wraps by the WTO.

And anyway, all the really powerful pages have already been removed, they’re been stored for safe keeping inside the Ark of the Covenant which is for real in a warehouse on the Isle of Wight. Nobody realises that the Indiana Jones warehouse thing was filmed in the actual place itself, they’re just laughing at us and we’ll never know because they have a Black Team removing all the good stuff from the archives just as we get close to seeing it, so we only get to see details that don’t make any sense.

Review of Kerry Greenwood’s “Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery”…

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Right from the start of her book, Australian crime writer Kerry Greenwood promises a lot to the reader (but mainly to herself): to try to understand the Somerton Man, her late father Al Greenwood, and the Adelaide of 1948; and to provide some explanations. Put all that together and it is, as they say, A Pretty Big Ask.

To her credit, I have to say that she really gives it a go: and for nearly a hundred pages, she actually succeeds. She reaches out towards an authorial tone that remains human(e) and well-informed – even her reminiscences of her father are of a piece with it all, and are neither excessively nostalgic nor cloying.

In fact, up to about page 95, I really felt right there with her overall project: she knows she isn’t Gerry Feltus (and frankly the world is doing OK with exactly one Gerry Feltus) and that’s OK, but she’s trying to write something else entirely, a kind of living, wharfie-centric social history, the schoonered ley lines of the underworld writing their story in dockyard scars and watch-smugglers’ high-tide japes.

But then… the hybrid / crossover narrative range sprawled janglingly out of her non-fiction reach, into a unconvincing Eton Mess of spies, hyperdontia, Israel, Berlin, ciphers, inquests, and even (I don’t want to type it but I know I have to) H. C. Reynolds. And then finished off with a 40-page Phryne Fisher short(ish) story, that feels scratchy, misjudged and dated all at the same time.

As a writer myself, I suspect it’s reasonably clear what happened. For nearly the first half the book, Greenwood works really bloody hard to summon up a kind of writing voodoo spell that I didn’t honestly think was possible: mixing Aussie dockside wisdom with a feel for a time and a place that constantly reads as though it is about to cast a light on a devilishly shadowy corner, through sheer writing force. Greenwood successfully manages to channel her fresh-faced 1975 grape-picking self talking with her dad, often as if his curly-haired ghost was occasionally casting a wry glance over her shoulder and setting right her flights of optimistic historical theorizing. And that is where her book is absolutely at its best.

And yet the remainder of the book is just so, I don’t know, disappointing and hollow. It’s not that it can’t deliver on the elevated promises made at the start (as a reader, you don’t believe that she can, but you don’t really mind as long as you enjoy the ride); it’s just that I think she used up her personal emotional reserves and will-to-get-it-done on the parts she actually knew something about – the rest she’s basically making up, and her heart and soul weren’t in it. By page 100, she’d burnt the project’s inner candle out, and had to complete the remainder by wind-up torchlight… it just wasn’t the same. (Please correct me if you think I’m wrong.)

And so… I’m kind of stuck as to what to say. It comes across as only half the book she aimed to write, but she was trying to write a book that was at least twice as hard to write as a normal book. But can a reviewer really recommend that readers buy it to read the first half of the book? It just doesn’t sound right.

Ultimately, it’s not a ‘proper’ guide to the Somerton Man mystery (Gerry Feltus’ book is as close to that as we’ll probably see this side of an identified body), nor is it a family memoir of a lost Adelaide. And yet… all I can say is that it is what it is, and you’ll buy it if you think it will work for you.

Voynich / Castel del Monte book launch in Brussels…

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Newly arrived Voynich theorists Giuseppe Fallacara and Ubaldo Occhinegro will be holding their book launch at the European Parliament in Brussels tomorrow (4th December 2013, 6pm, room ASP 5G2 if you just happen to be nearby).

They’ve even managed to bring Roberto Giacobbo, the hugely well-known (and much-parodied) guy from long-running TV history / pseudohistory documentary series Voyager on Italian channel Rai 2 along to the presentation to give his thoughts, along with MEP Sergio Silvestris, no doubt somewhat delighted that anyone outside of Brussels remembers that he has a pulse. Cipher Mysteries readers with sad photographic memories for trivia may recall that it was Giacobbo’s Voyager programme who busted the infamous “John Titor” time-traveller hoax waaaay back in 2008. Though not everything on Voyager has managed to reach the same level of factual accuracy and careful research, if its many critics are even partially to be believed.

As far as I can tell, what the two Italian Voynich authors will be demonstrating is that the Castel del Monte was not only an incomplete Imperial hunting lodge (as if anything so obvious could be the case, pshaw!), but also a planned fantastic herbal laboratory (of sorts) for gaining eternal life, via Voynich-style spagyric alchemy. It’s true that they seem a little bit wobbly as far as physical history (Roger Bacon? Hmmm) / codicology (what?) / art history (where?) goes – frankly, their Voynich theory seems to be all about architecture and nothing else – but that’s probably entirely par for the course. Perhaps they’ll have something genuinely interesting and insightful to say about the Voynich Manuscript I’m not expecting… anything’s possible, I guess.

The nicest thing of all is that they plan to stream the whole event live-and-direct to we far-away denizens of the Whole Wide World via their shiny website www.castello-manoscritto.it. So there’s still time to get a refund on that EasyJet flight to Belgium you just booked for tomorrow, because you can watch the whole thing at your PC or Mac, perhaps even in your dressing gown (depending on your timezone relative to 18:00 Central European Time).

I doubt they’ll allow questions from the (virtual) wings, though… it all looks that bit too fragile to stand up to proper scrutiny. I’m sure you’re way ahead of me already as far as what questions they’d find hard to answer (i.e. why does the Voynich’s cryptography so resemble ciphers made 150 years after the dates you’re talking about? etc), so I won’t list them here. 😉

Will I be in Brussels tomorrow? Well, not unless a CIA black team descends on Cipher Mysteries Mansion and some kind of extraordinary rendition thing happens (and it’s reassuring to that know the rules have changed so that I wouldn’t now get tortured in the process). However, my best guess is that no three-letter agency (or even honorary members GCHQ) is currently sufficiently bothered about the Voynich Manuscript to do that. But all being well, I’l doubtless try to stream it. Hopefully that will be as close as I need to get! 🙂

The Blitz Ciphers and null detection algorithms…

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I’ve just added a new permanent page on the mysterious Blitz Ciphers to Cipher Mysteries. Basically, I discovered a few days ago that I had much higher resolution versions of the three scans so far released than I remembered having (i.e. 4MP rather than 1MP), which gave me a good-sized shove to put a proper page up for them. Also, a big hat tip to Edward B for asking if I had anything so useful as decent-sized scans. 😉

But that has also prompted me to revisit the issue of why the Blitz Ciphers aren’t apparently trivially crackable with normal crypto tools (e.g. zkdecrypto etc). And that prompted me to think again about how to go about detecting / predicting nulls.

As always, I had a look for null detection algorithms on the Internet, just in case there was some kind of magical analytical framework out there that I had somehow missed (there’s nothing in Cryptool etc). The closest mention I found was a 2005 message from Brian Tawney on the Voynich mailing list that basically described his independent version of my own homebrewed null character detector: which basically comes down to comparing the distribution of letters preceding / following nulls and seeing how closely that distribution approximates the context-less distribution of letters in the message.

For what it’s worth, my implementation of this hack predicts that B / D / E / M / S are the glyphs in the Blitz Ciphers most likely to be nulls: while another null-detector hack I wrote (that calculates the per-glyph difference in 1st order entropy if individual characters are removed from the stream) predicts that E / B / M / C / S / D may well be nulls.

So far so reasonable, you might initially think. But from my perspective, the problem with this is that nulls also behave a lot like vowels, in that they sit comfortably next to many different other letters / glyphs, can occur quite often within a ciphertext, and tend not to contain much information (in the Shannon entropy sense of the word). So I’m very far from convinced that I could tell nulls from vowels, or even from high-frequency nomenclature tokens (such as “the”, “and”, or perhaps “Freemason” 😉 ).

I might be wrong, but arguably the biggest theoretical problem with both of these hacks is that I think we would need to feed them a substantially larger ciphertext (I’m guessing 10x larger?) to get properly significant results in the presence of other cipher mechanisms (e.g. homophonic equivalents). Whereas a decent simple substitution cipher cracker can have a decent go at breaking a monoalphabetic cipher with as little as, say, 30 characters… so it may be clever, but it seems an order of magnitude cruder than proper cryptanalytical kit.

So… where are all the null detection algorithms? It seems to me that the cryptanalytical tools written these days are more focused on the statistical nuances of computer-era cryptography, while old school trickery (such as nulls and homophones) gets relatively little attention outside of the Zodiac Killer Ciphers world. Maybe there just aren’t any out there.

…unless you know better? 🙂

List of Voynich facsimile / reproduction books…

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Here’s a list of the various Voynich facsimile editions that have been (or are still) actually in print and that I’ve heard about to date. Maybe you can buy them, maybe you can’t: but here’s everything I know, make of it all what you will.

Oh, and don’t get me started on Yale’s CopyFlo print, that was a purely monochrome edition that was really quite painful to work with: you basically had to simultaneously read the colour annotations in the interlinear transcription and imagine the details in the appropriate colour… which was neither effective nor useful. Thankfully that’s (very) ancient history now!

Also, if anyone passing has bought a copy of any of these apart from “Le Code Voynich”, please leave a comment here as to what you thought of it. People often ask me for a recommendation for a good Voynich facsimile edition, but don’t seem to grasp that these days review copies of anything are as rare as hen’s gold-capped false teeth… hence I don’t normally get to see any first hand.

* * * * * * * *

(1) Le Code Voynich – Jean-Claude Gawsewitch

The grand-daddy of the current generation: prefaced by a long (and fairly pointless) recap of the Voynich Manuscript’s history in French. Lots of image cropping: apparently conceived as a coffee table book rather than a facsimile edition. But very useful for Voynich researchers none the less (David Kahn was delighted by my copy, and wanted one for his own crypto library), if you happen to have bought your copy five years ago (when it was affordable – I think my last car ended up being worth less than what people currently sell copies of this for).

Binding: hardcover
Pages: 240 pages
Editeur : JC Gawsewitch Editeur (27 octobre 2005)
Collection : BEAU LIV LUX
Language: French
ISBN-10: 2350130223
ISBN-13: 978-2350130224
Size: 30.8cm x 26.8cm x 2.4cm

Price: out of print, 7 used copies currently on sale from 299 euros upwards (!!!)

(2) Le Voynich

Broché : 240 pages couleur.
Editeur : Editions HADES
Langue : Français
ISBN-13 : 9791092128031
http://www.hadeseditions.com/Le-Voynich
Price: 49,99 €, now reduced to 29,99 € (plus postage).

(3) VOYNICHŮV RUKOPIS

Publisher: CAD PRESS
ISBN 978-80-88969-60-0 / EAN 9788088969600
Binding: hardcover.
Size: 24cm x 17cm, 448 pages (in Czech, I believe), including a 272-page complete facsimile..
http://www.cadpress.sk/voynichuv_rukopis.htm
Price: 29,00 € reduced to 27,00 € (plus postage).

(4) The Voynich Manuscript – A Facsimile

Editor: David Durand
Publisher: Lulu (print-on-demand)
Pages: 251
Size: 21.59cm wide x 27.94cm tall
Binding: spiral bound
http://www.lulu.com/gb/en/shop/david-durand/the-voynich-manuscript-a-facsimile/paperback/product-20220326.html
Price: £43.66 (plus postage).

(5) El Manuscrito Voynich = The Voynich Manuscript

David G. Walker
Hardcover: 269 pages
Publisher: Editorial Sirio (31 Aug 2013)
Language: Spanish
ISBN-10: 8478089004
ISBN-13: 978-8478089000
Product Dimensions: 1.8cm x 17.8cm x 24.8cm

£26.21 RRP, reduced to £23.20 (plus postage).

(6) The Voynich Manuscript Illustrated: “One of the most mysterious books in the World” [Paperback]

Paperback: 212 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (4 Jan 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1481076701
ISBN-13: 978-1481076708
Product Dimensions: 1.4 x 15 x 22.6 cm
Price: £15.61 + postage on Amazon (RRP £18.74)
Feedback: three reviews on Amazon, all of them bad.

(7) The Voynich Manuscript Project

$199 buys you a classy-looking reproduction of the Voynich Manuscript from Ambush Printing. Or, alternatively, you can buy an 18″ x 24″ print of the nine-rosette foldout sexfolio on vellum quality paper for $24.99: or a 24″ x 36″ print of the nine-rosette foldout for $39.99.
208 pages printed from hi-res scans, and also folded just like the original (“includes 5 double-folio, 3 triple-folio, 1 quadruple-folio, and one giant six page folio”). Printed on vellum-style paper for added realism, hand stitched together, and then “bound with a single piece of handpicked leather to closely match the original Voynich cover”.
http://ambushprinting.squarespace.com/thevoynichmanuscriptproject/

Voynich Manuscript and the Castel del Monte…

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The Castel del Monte is a well-known octagonal fortress in Apulia, constructed in the 13th century for Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. However, it was never properly finished and ended up being used over the centuries as:
* a state prison;
* somewhere to loot nice bits of marble from; and
* a story location in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” (he rechristened his version the ‘Aedificium’). 🙂

Derelict for many years, the Castel was bought by the state in 1876 and subsequently restored (though more or less all the tasty-looking marble bits had been robbed out and scavenged). Nowadays, it’s not really of much consequence unless you happen to be on holiday in South-Eastern Italy and want something nice to look at. It is what it is, which is actually not nearly as much as people once hoped that it was.

But now possibly a brand new (and perhaps architecturally esoteric) chapter in its life has begun. Giuseppe Fallacara and Ubaldo Occhinegro have just had a book published by Gangemi Editore SpA, with the title Manoscritto Voynich e Castel del Monte. Yes, it’s a brand new Voynich theory.

What they seem to be proposing is that some of the Voynich Manuscript’s more architectural-style drawings (particularly the nine-rosette fold-out page, but also various others in the astronomical section, as I understand it) encode sort-of-plans for building the Castel del Monte, and include all kinds of mysterious and little-known plumbing details – “pipes, tubes, channels, cisterns, showers and fireplaces” etc – once present or nearly-present in its construction.

Well… it is certainly true that the design of this little castle was constructed with water management strongly in mind: there was a large cistern sunk in the rock immediately beneath the central courtyard, and tanks for capturing rainwater in some of the eight towers. There was also a (presumably substantial, but now lost) octagonal basin in the middle of the courtyard, briefly mentioned in the Castel’s official webpage.

And so I can certainly see how someone looking at the Voynich Manuscript’s drawings afresh while tilting their head in just the right way might feel somehow compelled to tease out some kind of parallel between the twin themes of architecture and plumbing that apparently inform both artefacts. But in fact active, central water management was a key part of castle design throughout the Middle Ages – for if you find yourself besieged, you can last for a long time with only a little food, but without plenty of water you will soon die.

I have to say that this sounds like the Castel del Monte could be one of the slimmer resemblances or correlations I’ve seen used to construct a Voynich theory upon or around. But Fallacara’s and Ogginegro’s book includes an English version on facing pages, so hopefully I will get to see their argument in full for myself before very long. At 40 euros plus shipping from Italy, the whooshing sound you might also hear is the vacuum left when the money leaves your wallet. But it does look quite pretty, maybe that’s enough. 🙂