Voynich Manuscript
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was a page from the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious manuscript currently held in Yale’s Bienecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. As Wikipedia’s extensive entry explains,
The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet and unintelligible language.
Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers — including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame — who all failed to decipher a single word. This string of egregious failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into the Holy Grail of historical cryptology; but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is nothing but an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of random symbols.
The book is named after the Russian-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. It is presently item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book Library of Yale University.
I’ve been poking around the links in the discussion thread which contains a number of interesting links on the book. One of them is a recent Scientific American article by Dr Gordon Rugg who believes he has discovered the method by which it was created, leading him to speculate that the book was perhaps an elaborate hoax by alchemist Edward Kelley to swindle Emperor Rudolf II.
You can actually view it online by searching the word “Voynich” at the Beinecke Digital Images Online site.