Pen and ink by Gabriel Caprav |
Poe had a madness for ciphers. This was most famously exhibited in "The Gold Bug," which includes a substitution cipher (and a lengthy explanation of its solution) as a key plot point.
That cipher reads as follows:
53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡.)4‡);806*;48†8 ¶60))85;1‡(;:‡*8†83(88)5*†;46(;88*96 *?;8)*‡(;485);5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(5*—4)8 ¶8*;4069285);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;48081;8:8‡ 1;48†85;4)485†528806*81(‡9;48;(88;4 (‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188;‡?;
And is solved thus:
A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye of the death's-head a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.
Poe Cipher |
They remained forgotten and unsolved until Professor Louis Renza of Dartmouth College brought them to light in 1985. Prof. Renza subsequently established the Edgar Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge, complete with a $2500 prize, to crack the codes. In 2000, Gil Broza managed to do it and claimed the prize.
There was some hope that these ciphers would turn out to be new, previously unknown writing by Poe, but this is almost certainly not the case. One was a passage from Cato, by the English essayist Joseph Addison. The other remains unidentified, but is not in any style recognizable as Poe's.
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