Mysteries and Not-So-Mysteries

“So – Little One, I have something very, very interesting to tell you!”

“What Daddy? What?”

She loves mysteries and mysterious objects, so here goes. “There is a strange book that’s over four hundred years old. It’s over two hundred pages long, and it’s written in a strange language with strange letters that no one has ever seen before. And no one has been able to figure it out.”

She’s hooked: “What’s it about?”

“No one really knows … on just about every page are mysterious diagrams and drawings. Some are called ‘cosmological,’ and may have something to do with the universe. Others are drawings of weird plants that no one has ever seen on Earth before.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Again, we don’t know. There are some clues and some guesses, but the identity of the man who wrote it is unknown. It was hidden for two-hundred and fifty years until it was re-discovered by a book dealer named Voynich. The book itself is now known as the Voynich Manuscript.”

“The Voynich Manuscript?”

“Yes!”

Then, suddenly and with a shrug of her shoulders: “Oh, I know that book.”

“What?!” My latest obsession, and my nine-year-old daughter ‘knows’ about it? “What do you know of it?”

Now she’s bored but a little amused by my reaction. “Oh, it was in one of the books I read last year. You know, The Thirty-Nine Clues. They had to find out what the book meant as part of a puzzle that needed to be solved.”

? ! ? !

“Well, don’t keep me waiting! What did they find out?”

“I don’t remember. It was back in the spring.”

Ahhhhckkk!