PREFACE TO A SALES CATALOGUE OF ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS ON CRYPTOGRAPHY

 by David Kahn

            Cryptology’s jewels consist of its great men, its elegant mathematics, its brilliant solutions, its ingenious cipher machines – and its antiquarian books. The mathematics and the solutions belong to all. The people cannot be owned. Only the machines and the books can be acquired. The polished mechanisms indeed glitter, but the books, in the richness of their typography, their illustrations, their bindings, the very thoughts of their authors – the books glow like rubies.

            They represent a literature older than that of espionage. They speak to us across the centuries in the voices of the scholars, the philosophers, the diplomats, the mystics who composed them. They record the advancement of a technology that has shortened conflicts and eased world tensions and that culminates today in cell phone privacy and in authenticated electronic commerce. In those contributions, as well as in the books’ beauty and their antiquity, lies the value of these works.

            But for me they also carry a personal meaning. They are friends from boyhood. I do not mean to say that I owned them then – far from it. Indeed, when I first became interested in cryptology (or cryptography, as it was then ambiguously called), I was not aware that they existed. Then, in the summer of 1945, I ordered Joseph S. Galland’s An Historical and Analytical Bibliography of the Literature of Cryptology.  I didn’t even know what a bibliography was, but the book presumably dealt with cryptography, so I bought it.  When it arrived, I found to my great disappointment that all it did was list books.  It didn’t discuss the cipher systems that fascinated me. But as I got over my disappointment, I realized its value. I knew about the Vigenère tableau; Galland told me that Blaise de Vigenère had written a book in which he described his famous chiffre carré. I advanced from a focus on the techniques of cryptology to an acquaintanceship with its literature. I began to read Galland  avidly. I learned the names of authors and the dates of publication of their books – dates I still remember. Galland opened a world to me.

            I discovered books that I could track down, read, and sometimes buy.  One of the first was Donald Millikin’s Elementary Cryptography and Cryptanalysis, reproduced from typewritten copy, bound in heavy blue paper, and used in a course at New York University. Another was the reprint of Captain Parker Hitt’s excellent World War I text, Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers. Many of the other books were printed in America in the 1920s and 1930s, most of them out of print:  Hitt’s elementary The ABC of  Secret Writing, Hugo Koch;s small book of cryptologic miscellany printed on glossy paper, the introductory work written under the pseudonym of Henry Lysing (when I discovered that the publisher lived in my home town of Great Neck, I naïvely knocked on his door on Station Road to try to get a copy but was turned away by the woman who answered – not the right thing to do to a boy, I thought). I mostly forget how I got them, but I do remember that when I passionately wanted Herbert Yardley’s The American Black Chamber I went to a firm called, I believe, the Seven Book Hunters, who advertised in The New York Times Book Review. They got it for me. From a dealer in back issues of magazines, I purchased his four articles on cryptology in The Saturday Evening Post.

            By then I had had several years of French at Great Neck High. Galland said that Marcel Givierge’s 1925 Cours de Cryptographie was an “excellent general text on cryptography,”  so I took the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan to the New York Public Library.  I obtained permission – needed because I was still in high school – to use the library and requested the Givierge. Under the wide arched windows of the library’s vast main reading room, I dove in.  My French wasn’t quite as good as I had thought, but I learned a lot from the diagrams of cipher systems.  Later I worked my way through many of the other books under *ICP, the classmark  for what the library catalogued under “cipher writing.”

            Many of Galland’s longer, more discursive entries dealt with the antiquarian books of cryptology – those by Trithemius, Selenus, Porta, Kircher, Schott.  I had all but memorized Galland’s descriptions, but the books defeated me. They were all in Latin, which I did not know; I would not have been permitted into the NYPL’s rare book room to consult them; I could not afford them, and would not have known from which dealers to obtain them. There was one  exception: Vigenère’s Traicté des Chiffres. I lusted for that book. The Vigenère cipher was then the most famous in the world. Though written in a French as remote from us as Shakespeare’s English is, I flattered myself that I could handle it. Somehow I heard of a copy being offered for $100 – a figure that even I thought was low. But I was a schoolboy and didn’t have that kind of money. I knew where to get it, though.  My grandmother, Gussie Abraham, though tough as a businesswoman, was soft on me.  And sure enough, she spoiled her first grandson (not for the first time) with that book.  She was rewarded, however:  the check never cleared!

            Another book I coveted was the Trithemius.  It included the Ave Maria cipher, an interesting sounding system whose operation for a long time I never understood. I knew that it was set out in the first printed book on cryptology, that Trithemius was an abbot – whatever that was – and that an aura of occultism enveloped the book.  But not until I returned from my honeymoon in 1969 did I get an offer to buy it.  My bride didn’t understand why I seemed to be so anxious about merely buying a book – until she found out that it cost $800.  In retrospect, that looks like a bargain.

            Gradually the books that had merely been names to me in Galland became possessions. Over time – and time is a main ingredient in successful collecting – I acquired the works of Collange (at last I could read Trithemius in translation) with its elegant volvelles, of Selenus, a duke and socially the highest ranking author, with his links to the royal family of Great Britain, of Porta, a member of one of the first societies of scientists, of Wilkins, with its mysterious lines and triangles concealing a message, of  Davys, with its narrative of John Wallis’s cryptanalyses, of Schott, Lindenfels, and others. When I came to write The Codebreakers, this bibliographical work stood me in good stead, for they had taught me some of the landmarks of the terrain and familiarized me with the various cipher systems and their relationbships.

Copyright © 2008 David Kahn. All rights reserved.