The World's Most Difficult Book To Read

Lingua Franca ^ | Lev Grossman

[scouse]

THE STRUGGLE TO DECIPHER THE WORLD'S MOST DIFFICULT BOOK

BY LEV GROSSMAN

"And that is what you are going to tell the FBI?" Marcus Brody asked, as he and Indy passed through the double doors of the Museum of Antiquity. "That there was nothing to any of it? The Tomb of Hermes does not exist, Voynich is gibberish, and the philosopher's stone is simply a dream?"
–Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone (1995)

THE EMPLOYEES BEHIND THE blond-wood circulation desk at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library have heard it all before, so when I ask to see the Voynich manuscript they glance at each other, eyebrows raised, as if to say, "Oh, God, not another one." A couple of them even know the call number off the tops of their heads: MS 408. One of the Beinecke's curators remarks dryly, "You're not the first."

In the reading room, the Voynich manuscript is brought out to me on slabs of gray foam rubber daintily arranged like an exotic dish at a restaurant. It's a drab, unassuming volume, about six inches by nine and maybe three inches thick–roughly the dimensions of a hardcover Stephen King novel. The pages are made of soft light-brown vellum (fine, thin calfskin) with uneven edges. They're held together by three leather thongs and wrapped in more vellum that has been folded in around the edges to make a cover.

The 204 pages of the Voynich manuscript are crowded with writing, tiny letters penned in a careful, even hand. Almost every page carries an illustration drawn in a crude but compelling style that suggests a determined amateur rather than a trained artist.

First come pictures of fantastic plants with bulbous seedpods and snaky roots, then dizzying wheel-shaped astrological and cosmological diagrams.

Later pages are covered with bizarre panoramas depicting hundreds of plump, naked women bathing in water that comes streaming out of long, loosely sketched pipes and flumes. The women have rouged cheeks and carefully dotted nipples.

Some of the illustrations are in color: royal blues, watery greens, and red browns that look like dried blood. Faces with oddly wistful expressions are everywhere, peering out from moons and planets and even doodled into leaves and roots. Some pages unfold unexpectedly, centerfold-style, into four- or six-page posters crammed with detail.

One poster has been crumpled and wadded up and won't lie flat. Someone, not the original scribe, has added page numbers, and there are gaps in the numbering where pages have been lost. But as curious as the pictures are, the most unsettling thing about the Voynich manuscript is the text itself.

It's written in a mysterious alphabet that exists nowhere else in the world, and after centuries of study, not even the most accomplished medieval historians and military code breakers have been able to figure out what it says, or who wrote it, or when, or where, or why.

THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT is named for one Wilfrid M. Voynich, an American rare-book dealer who came across it in 1912 in the library of the Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy, near Rome. The Jesuits who owned the manuscript knew almost nothing about it. Recognizing the manuscript as an unusual and potentially valuable artifact, Voynich purchased it and brought it back with him to America. He circulated photostats of the pages to scholars he thought might have a shot at deciphering it: paleographers, medieval historians, cryptographers, linguists, philologists, even astronomers and botanists.

Voynich had every reason to expect a quick solution. Encrypted manuscripts were hardly unknown, nor were they considered particularly intractable.

According to David Kahn's The Codebreakers (Scribner's, 1996), the influence of Leopold von Ranke's "objective" approach to writing history inspired nineteenth-century historians with a new interest in primary documents, and what they discovered when they reopened government and church archives was that many of the older, more diplomatically sensitive papers were encrypted.

The challenge of deciphering them gave rise to a brand-new subdiscipline: historical cryptography. The nineteenth-century abbot Domenico Pietro Gabbrielli, who worked in the diplomatic section of the state archives of Florence, was famous for having single-handedly deciphered 1,755 codes dating from as early as 1414.

Continued at above address

[scouse]

Anyone who understands "Dotted Nipples" should be able to crack this in a week. :^))

[eno_]

I expect some people had time to play rather elaborate jokes. The author must be chuckling, wherever he is now.

[ZOOKER]

Maybe the author was a gov't employee, unsupervised, paid by the page.

Mystery solved!

[A Vast RightWing Conspirator]

[Maceman]

When they finally figure out how to translate it, the result will be:

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

[A Vast RightWing Conspirator]

[Don Corleone]

First draft for "Leaves of Grass"?

[william clark]

Perhaps penned by a bored calligraphy student.

[scouse]

Thanks for the pictures, however #6 is from my old biology jotter when I was at school. :^))

[GSWarrior]

My bad...thought we would be discussing Atlas Shrugged or something.

[A Vast RightWing Conspirator]

[steve-b]

I thought it would be Clinton's "non-fiction" memoir.

[scouse]

They are really fascinating pages.

[scottiewottie]

I was certain that the book was the IRS code, even after reading about "dotted nipples". And yes, in some cases "dotted nipples" are deductable...

[ThreePantherEightyDuce]

William Faulkner is a challenging author to read.

I would prefer torture to then to ever have to read any of Henry James' work again.

[Charles Martel]

When they finally figure out how to translate it, the result will be:

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

I'm betting on:

D-O-N-T-F-O-R-G-E-T-T-O-D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E.

:-)

[A Vast RightWing Conspirator]

More here.

[Aggie Mama]

That page looks like a 70's cook book. I would title that page "Leek soup in tureens".

[Aggie Mama]

Heh heh heh

[Alouette]

It's a lost, unpublished manuscript by J.R.R.Tolkien!