And the Word of the Day is: Voynich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/voynich.html

http://www.voynich.nu/

First, some background. Back around 1986 or so, when I lived in Reston, madbodger showed me this book in the bookstore one day when we were out to lunch together. It was called _The Codex Seraphinianus_. It was the best book ever! Imagine a world, in appearance and aesthetic, something like the movie _Fantastic Planet_. Point is, it's not Earth, even tho it seems to have some common properties. Now, imagine that you have come into posession of an encyclopedia from that planet. The pictures, the writing, the topics, they all kind of make sense. They're recognisable, but you have no clue how to translate it, so all you can do is look on in wonder and turn page after page of this incredible tome.
Anton Serafini did just this with his Codex. It was amazing. HUNDREDS of pages of illustrations from the whimsical, to the surreal to the incomprehensible, accompanied by masses of text in symbols that have some internal sense or scheme, but nothing you recognise. The book was on sale, but even marked down, it was pricey, so Spam wanted to confirm his suspicion that I would LOVE this book before he gifted it to me for my birthday. To this day, it ranks as one of the best birthday presents I've ever recieved. Alas, when the group house I lived in broke apart, my _Codex Seraphinianus_ was stolen, and none of the previous occupants or hangers out claim to know or have any clue what happened to it. Yeah right.
The book quickly went out of print, and copies of it now fetch money that is way out of my league anymore.

Now, knowing how I feel about this book, imagine my delight to find out that it was very probably inspired by a very real object that is something quite the same. Fred Blonder told me all about it last week.

The _Voynich Manuscript_ is a book, that experts can kind of reliably date to an origin in the 14 - 1500's. It's composed of a bunch of very cryptic, almost recognisable pictures, and filled with text written in an alphabet/language that no one date has truly been able to decipher. Nobody really knows what it is, an alchemy manual, an herbal, a diary, or what, even tho it would seem to posess many of those qualities. It would be easy to dismiss as babble or a hoax if it were not so extensive and if it were not so incredibly self-consistent that linguistic statistical analysis keeps suggesting that it *could* make some kind of sense. The handwriting even holds up as being consistent with one person, even tho it evolves some from beginning to end, but people do that too.

I've seen a couple of pictures and have just begun to explore some of the lore and literature surrounding this genuine enigmatic artifact. If anything could thrill me more than the _Codex_, I think that this thing from REAL LIFE is it.
Apparently there has been at least one facsimile copy published. Now if acquiring a copy doesn't cost as much as the Codex, I think I may have finally found a substitute I can be happy about.

Check it out. It will BLOW your mind into little pieces.

Dear Santa...