The cryptography of the Voynich Manuscript...?

nickpelling2 writes: "There's a new book out called "The Curse of the Voynich" (I should know, I wrote it), which reveals the story behind the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript — that it was created by a disillusioned Renaissance architect to hide his books of secrets. It's a bit like a non-fiction Da Vinci Code (but without the car chases etc).

The crypto scoop here is that, rather than being a hoax (as per this 2003 /. news story), 'Voynichese' turns out to be a complex overlapping set of transposition ciphers, carefully designed to resemble an archaic substitution cipher. It's actually a thing of beauty, in a geeky kind of way (I should know, I'm also a games programmer).

There's also a 30-minute Skypecast on this scheduled for next Saturday (30th Dec 2006) if this presses your buttons."