We had another rainy day in Central Texas. The distilled cloud essence departed from the featureless gray void above and changed our dry and parched world. The grass is sending up little sprouts here and there which is spoiling the timeless uniformity of the My-Lynx Headquarters front lawn. We use an electric mower which sort of precludes the use of this efficient device during periods when the ground is wet and moist, and the blades don't cut well either.

We took our precious deliveries down to the Post Office, submitted them at the big blue altar of the Mercurial Messenger dressed in blue who will send them wide and far to their ultimate destinations around the country. The cool mist alternated with a few cloud breaks, where there was a few minutes of brilliant sunshine, and the edges of the lofty clouds became visible in the distance. We had a few mundane tasks to perform, some work on the mighty MyLynx Books chariot. And what did we do while the extended maintenance took place. We knew a place that sells books lurked nearby, a place where we had not visited in many months. We entered this humble establishment and perused the stacks and stacks of myriad and sundry volumes. We found a possible personal favorite for resale shortly:

The author's name rung of exotic places:  "Alexander D'Agapeyeff". The title is Codes and Ciphers. It is a hardback reprint (no dust jacket) of a 1939 edition, as it says "issued in series" presumably as pamphlets or in a periodical. It is an introductory text, but has some fascinating little tidbits about earlier forms of coded communication: the sephamore. That should perk up the interest of anyone who has read Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" which has itself has a fascinating recapitulation of the different communications systems used. And anyone who uses computers will need to know at some point, at least for conversation in polite society,  the relationship between these relatively ancient "networks", as we would now call them, and contemporary high speed networks.

This book looks as good a place to start with the topic of encoding and decoding. It has some interesting pastimes, such as encoding mail in the form of "cryptograms", which while, by our modern standards would be somewhat tedious, for the letter-writers of those times it might be of a form of novel interest. And who is to say, in 1939, if Europeans might have more than a casual interest in keeping snoopers out of their private correspondence. Here are some opening lines from the book, it starts with a quote:

‘A man is born without any languages and yet is capable of all.’
                                                                                                                                 - BISHOP WILKINS


Codes and ciphers appear at first sight to be such complicated and difficult affairs, and so completely wrapped in mystery, that all but the boldest hesitate to tackle them; yet as Bishop Wilkins implied in the sentence quoted above, any person of average ability is capable of acquiring a knowledge of almost any subject, and there is no reason why we should not, with the exercise of patience and perseverance, become familiar with the main principles of Cryptography—to give this fascinating science its proper name.

Most people have a natural curiosity to know what lies beyond the closed door, what secrets are hidden behind signs and symbols that have no obvious meaning. When the urge to solve such problems becomes a dominating force in a man’s life, then he may discover new worlds. It may be that there is nothing much left to be discovered in the material world, but there are unlimited possibilities in the world of thought and ideas.