At the back of a book about secret writing, just above the 3 on a conservator’s ruler, a little crooked fiber sits in a blank sheet of paper. Look below the fiber and there’s an H. A little farther right there’s an S. A pale line runs over the tops of both letters, and another runs under their feet. Someone appears to have gone to considerable trouble to put squares on a page that nobody wrote on.
The book is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri IX, printed in Lüneburg in 1624. Its author, Duke August, wrote under the name Gustavus Selenus. Folger conservators spotted the grid while examining the book for an exhibition on codes and ciphers. If you opened the cover hoping to see what they saw, you’d need to know where to put the light.
Hold your place on the sheet
The Folger photographed the front endpaper in ordinary light and the rear one against a light. This diagram keeps one patch of the rear sheet in place. Its front-lit view illustrates the conservator’s account. Its backlit view maps the lines and letters in his photograph.
Stray Press diagram, simplified. Inspect Austin Plann Curley’s backlit photograph with its centimeter ruler. Folger Shakespeare Library, Z103 .A9 1623 Cage.
Check your guess
A pen could draw a square that neat. Look at what happens to the lines when the light comes through.
Yes. The pale lines record the surface that held the wet fibers.
A binder did choose this leaf. The pattern goes back a step further, to the making of the sheet.
The grid was in the papermaker’s mould. Less pulp collected over its raised wires. Light passes more easily through those thinner places. The fine lines, broad squares and letters all show up pale together.
What a square adds to the evidence
A sheet of handmade paper often shows two families of lines when you hold it up to a window. The fine, close-set ones are called laid lines. Crossing them at much wider intervals are chain lines. In the Folger photograph, the fine lines run sideways. Most of them are so close together that, at the scale of the whole page, they nearly disappear into the color of the paper.
Now go back to the two broad lines that bracket the H and S. They run in the same direction as the fine lines. That’s the oddity. A few heavier horizontal wires among the fine ones could leave those bright bands. Where the bands cross the ordinary uprights, you get squares. You can see how an ordinary papermaking screen leaves its tracks and then look for the extra set here.
The letters are another piece of the same puzzle. On one side of the sheet the conservators found a winged cherub’s head. On the other they found the little HS, a second watermark called a countermark. Both were formed in the paper. Neither gives us a secure name to put to the maker of this particular mould.
A change of light you can check in photographs
Try the same move on a different sheet. The Library of Congress photographed one patch of handwriting twice in blue light. Keep an eye on the gap in the writing about a third of the way down. Send the light through the sheet and the top of a crown appears there. Follow its base down to the circle. Once you’ve seen how much of that design fits under ordinary handwriting, a grid hiding in a blank endpaper seems quite modest.
The date hiding in the leather
There’s a good reason to hesitate before calling these a cipher writer’s squares. The book has two dates, and they belong to different trades. 1624 is the printer’s date. Inside the back cover, on the narrow edge of leather folded over the board, a gold stamp gives the name Christianus Sommer and the year 1687. The Folger conservators took Sommer for a likely owner and 1687 for the probable year of binding. That would put the binder at work sixty-three years after the printer. The blank leaves at either end were the binder’s to supply.
What would someone have wanted with a whole sheet of such squares? A writing guide is one possibility the Folger investigation turned up. There’s even an archival record of somebody asking for paper to do that job. In Vienna on October 1, 1824, Anton Ferdinand Drexler obtained a privilege for making Schulpapier, school paper. The entry says its visible lines would help beginners write. It gives us an actual use for lines built into paper, two hundred years after the cipher book went to press.
Another suggestion was that the lines helped someone tear off little squares. Neither suggestion tells us what order the mill was filling when it made the Folger sheet. The binder has left us a name in gold, the papermaker a grid in light. The missing piece is the person who wanted those squares in the first place.