Re: John Collins/PS + a ?


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Posted by John Collins (194.164.232.108) on October 12, 2003 at 00:08:20:

In Reply to: Re: John Collins/PS + a ? posted by MrTim on October 11, 2003 at 21:55:20:

This a response to all comments on this thread.

Michael, you asked if there were any mountains, rivers , salt mines etc in the region, The answer is yes, but I don't see how that helps as he wrote Apologia in 1716-17 and did not get to live in Karlshafen until about 1726 and that is some distance from Kassel (by horse in those days)where he was living. The area is very attractive with hills and winding rivers and tree-clad slopes. Mining is carried out some further distance away in the Erzeberg region and is really too far to consider. But yes he could have buried one of his wheels. I just think that given a choice it was safer and easier to bury a coded manuscript.

Grim, the town where he lived at the time he wrote that he had buried MT, was probably Karlshafen since the only other place was Kassel and he had been arrested after he left there.

Grim's thought on skipping letters echo my own and I have tried in a half-hearted way to do that but I produced garbage and gave up quite quickly. It will as you say need a software program and a dedicated code-breaker.

Mr. Tim, you're welcome to work on Apologia but, unlike Das Triumphans it's only in German and some of it is a bit difficult to decipher due the ink migration but it's still possible. My version is as accurate as I can make it but it is not a photocopy of the original. Each page starts and finishes with the same words as the original so there are the same number of lines as the original, but it is not an exact copy. The Xs are as close as I can make them to the original but again there may be differences.

Further to that point we need to keep in mind what Bessler was trying to put across and I think whole words would have been easier than individual letters and since he wrote the Apologia, he could add any word that might be missing. He could not control the printing to such a degree that he could specify where on a line, the Xs were placed, so just their presence was all that was needed.

Finally both versions are ready and I'm just arranging printing. Should be available in the next couple of weeks.

John Collins


: : Once again just a guess. JB's thinking is so erratic it's hard to get into his head.
: :
: : grim

: I'm ready to. I've already nailed one 'code'. (Voynich manuscript. See my page at: http://hometown.aol.com/arqy0plex/index.html - Sorry Scott, I couldn't resist plugging it!)
: Can't do anything until John's facsimiles come out though. (Which brings up a question.)
: Hey John, are the pages in your reprints the exact same layout as in the originals? i.e. if I took the same page of each would they match up line for line, word for word? (I'm talking about the parts in German/Latin, not the English translations.)
: MrTim
: p.s. Nice to hear that Kahn's still around. I wonder if he'd remember what a pest I was all those years ago? ;-)




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