Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Only if Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, J. R. R. Tolkien and Will Shortz clubbed together in a moment of wickedness could humanity produce a more vexing object: behold the Voynich Manuscript, a puzzling artifact from the late fifteenth century written by an unknown author, in an unidentified script, in an unknown language. Since 1912, cryptographers, palaeographers, and others with time on their hands have failed to decipher this mysterious document; naturally one theory is that it's a monstrous hoax, though its text seems to bear the hallmarks of a genuine language (note the cross-references on Zipf's Law, information entropy, and the Cardan grille). Any theories? — JH

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