Virginia Woolf Signed Copy of Orlando For Sale
The folks at Paul Fraser Collectibles always have interesting Book and Manuscripts items to sell. They even have locks of hair from famous authors and world leaders for sale at very affordable prices. The Signed Orlando is very special and is at a fair price given its importance and rarity. The Paul Fraser site is one you may want to bookmark, I also recieve their newsletter which is always full of very interesting information. Here is the scoop on Orlando:
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is often regarded as one of the foremost modernist figures in literature of the 20th century.
Her most famous works include Orlando, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
After battling bouts of depression for much of her life, Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in Sussex in 1941.
This magnificent book is a hardcover limited edition of Orlando, measuring 6.25" x 9.25". It is one of a limited edition of only 800 copies of the book signed by the author, this being number 465.
Orlando, published in 1928, is a novel partly based on Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West.
The book has been signed by Woolf in purple ink on the reverse of the half title page. The autograph is in excellent condition.
The book also features an owner's bookplate which has been affixed to the front pastedown showing the books original owner was the famous American Impressionist landscape painter Daniel Garber. This copy originates from Garber's personal library - the bookplate reads "Ex Libris - Daniel and Mary F Garber". Garber's paintings are now on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Pencil notations have been made on the first, blank page. The book also features some light overall toning and some light sunning to the spine, otherwise it is in fine condition.
Virginia Wolfe Signature
A rarely seen signed edition of an important 20th century novel with great provenance having come from the library of Daniel Garber.
(M) (PF373)
For sale: £1,950 $2,535.07 USD
All items are sold with:
A Certificate of Authenticity
Free insured delivery
Copy and Past the following url to purchase:
http://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/section.asp?catid=209&docid=6664
Sorry - I am having trouble setting a link here. Also wanted to let you know that I am not connected with Paul Fraser Collectibles in any way. I will not benefit from any sale.
[Top]Mysterious Manuscript's Code Has Been Cracked, 'Prophet of God' Claims
Source: FoxNews.com
Written in "alien" characters, illustrated with sketches, and dating back hundreds of years, the Voynich Manuscript has puzzled cryptographers, historians and bibliophiles for centuries.
And now the mystery has finally come to an end, according to a businessman from Finland named Viekko Latvala, a self described "prophet of god," who says he has decoded the book and unlocked the secrets of the world's most mysterious manuscript.
Latvala's business associate, Ari Ketola told FoxNews.com the meaning of the crazy characters he described as "sonic waves and vocal syllables."
"The book is a life work and scientific publication of medicine that would be still useful today," Ketola said. "The writer was a scientist of plants, pharmacy, astrology and astronomy. It contains ... prophesy for some decades and hundreds of years ahead from the time it was created."
In other words, the Voynich Manuscript -- which is currently held by Yale University's Beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Conn. -- is an herbological tome, something the writer used to keep track of plants and their uses for either scientific or medical purposes. And a prophecy.
Latvala provided the following translation of plant 16152, which he said can be found today in Ethiopia:
"The name of the flower is Heart of Fire.
It makes the skin beautiful when made as an ointment.
The oil is pressed from the buds.
This ointment is used for the wrinkles.
Is suitable for the kidneys and the head,
as the flower prevents inflammations, is antibiotic.
Plant is 10 centimeters by its height.
It grows on hot and dry slants.
The plant is bright green by its color."
So how could Latvala decode a manuscript that still dumbfounds the world's top cryptographers? It's simple. You just have to have a direct line to God.
"Mr. Latvala said that no one 'normal human' can decode it, because there is no code or method to read this text, it's a channel language of prophecy," Ketola told FoxNews.com. "This type of persons are most rare to exist, yet they have always been on face of the Earth through millenniums up to today ... and Mr Veikko Latvala has had this gift of mercy last 20 years."
Several top cryptographers contacted by FoxNews.com declined to comment on Latvala's claim, willing neither to validate his interpretation nor offer a counter explanation for the strange book. Ketola would not explained his methodology, but offered some insight into the weird characters.
"The language of this book is quite twisted," Ketola said. "The sound syllables are a mixture of Spanish and Italian, also mixed with the language this man used to speak himself. His own language was a rare Babylonian dialect that was spoken in a small area in Asia."
The author of the Voynich Manuscript did not know how to write in any extant language, Ketola said, so he had to create his own alphabet and vocabulary. "This man could not write any language so he had to invent a writing he can read / pronounce himself," he said.
Ketola suggested that the language may have also been some sort of shorthand writing the author used to jot down notes for himself.
Another mysterious, "alien" book that no one can read was unraveled last month by Kevin Knight, a computer scientist with the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering.
The Copiale Cipher -- a mysterious cryptogram bound in gold and green brocade paper -- is a 250-year-old coded document. By decrypting it, Knight and his colleagues uncovered the inner workings of an 18th-century secret society.
Knight declined to comment on Ketola's discovery.
[Top]How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code
Source: New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 24, 2011
It has been more than six decades since Warren Weaver, a pioneer in automated language translation, suggested applying code-breaking techniques to the challenge of interpreting a foreign language.
In an oft-cited letter in 1947 to the mathematician Norbert Weiner, he wrote: “One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’ ”
That insight led to a generation of statistics-based language programs like Google Translate — and, not so incidentally, to new tools for breaking codes that go back to the Middle Ages.
Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. They described their work at a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Ore.
Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters. The name comes from one of only two non-coded inscriptions in the document.
Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.
It began as a weekend project this year, Dr. Knight said in an interview, adding: “I don’t have much experience in cryptography. My background is primarily in computational linguistics and machine translation.”
Uncertain of the original language, the researchers went down several blind alleys before following their hunches. First, they assumed the Roman characters and not the abstract symbols contained all of the information.
But when that approach failed, they figured that the code was what cryptographers call a homophonic cipher — a substitution code that does not have a straightforward correspondence between the original and encoded information. And they decided the original language was probably German.
Eventually they concluded that the Roman letters were so-called nulls, meant to mislead the code breaker, and that the letters represented spaces between words made up of elaborate symbols. Another crucial discovery was that a colon indicated the doubling of the previous consonant.
The researchers used language-translation techniques like expected word frequency to guess what a symbol might equal in German.
“It turned out that we can apply a lot those techniques to code breaking,” Dr. Knight said.
The work is being praised by other experts. “Cracking the Copiale Cipher was a neat bit of work by Kevin Knight and his collaborators,” said Nick Pelling, a British software designer and a security specialist who maintains Cipher Mysteries, a cryptography news blog.
But while the cipher was a notable success, Dr. Knight and his colleagues have been frustrated by other, more impenetrable ciphers.
“There are these books and ancient languages of real historical value that contain historical information that we just can’t get out yet, and that’s of interest to a lot of people,” he said in a filmed interview describing the Copiale project.
The work has value to historians who are trying to understand the spread of political ideas. Secret societies were all the rage in the 18th century, Dr. Knight said, and they had an influence on both the American and French Revolutions. He recently shared the decoded Copiale text with Andreas Onnerfors, a historian at Lund University in Sweden and an expert on secret societies.
“When he saw the book and the decoded version, he was very excited about it,” Dr. Knight said. “He found a political commentary at the end that talked about the natural rights of man. That was pretty interesting and early.”
Modern examples of challenging ciphers include the communications the Zodiac killer sent to the police in California in the 1960s and ’70s, and the “Kryptos” sculpture, commissioned for the C.I.A. headquarters, which has been only partly decoded.
But the white whale of the code-breaking world is the Voynich manuscript. Comprising 240 lavishly illustrated vellum pages, it has defied the world’s best code breakers. Though cryptographers have long wondered if it is a hoax, it was recently dated to the early 1400s.
With a University of Chicago computer scientist, Dr. Knight this year published a detailed analysis of the manuscript that falls short of answering the hoax question, but does find some evidence that it contains patterns that match the structure of natural language.
“It’s been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world,” he said. “It’s super full of patterns, and so for somebody to have created something like that would have been a lot of work. So I feel that it’s probably a code.”
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