The Large-Print Codebreaker

Learn to crack secret messages from the very first letter, and then crack 125 of them, in print big enough to read without squinting.

A cryptogram looks like nonsense until you know where to look. This book shows you where. Each chapter tells a true story of a secret message, from Julius Caesar's letters to the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, teaches the method with a finished example, then hands you puzzles that start easy and get harder. It ends in the Cryptogram Room: 52 classic cryptoquotes in three levels.

Who it is for

Adults who enjoy the newspaper puzzle page and have always wondered how cryptograms are solved, and anyone who already loves them and is tired of faint, tiny print and answers that are hard to find. Nothing is assumed: the first page you turn to has a solved example, and every new method is explained before you are asked to use it. It makes a good present for a parent or grandparent who likes puzzles and history.

You need a pencil and either a printer or a tablet with a pen. No internet, no calculator, no outside knowledge.

The 14 chapters

1. Caesar's Shift (Rome): moving every letter along the alphabet
2. The Mirror Alphabet (the Hebrew Bible): Atbash, A for Z
3. The Spartan Staff (Sparta): letters moved, not changed, and the rail fence
4. Polybius's Square (Greece): letters as numbers, and the prisoners' knock code
5. Count the Letters (Baghdad): al-Kindi's discovery, and how to solve any cryptogram, step by step
6. The Queen's Cipher (England, 1586): Mary, Queen of Scots, and a symbol alphabet
7. The Pigpen (the Freemasons): Benjamin Franklin's rules in the Masons' cipher
8. Poe's Challenge (1843): Edgar Allan Poe's own Gold-Bug cryptogram, all 203 signs, exactly as he printed it
9. Dots and Dashes (1844): Morse code
10. The Unbreakable Cipher (the Civil War): Vigenère, with the Confederacy's real keywords
11. The Dancing Men (Sherlock Holmes): a figure alphabet you break as Holmes did
12. The Book Cipher (Virginia, 1885): numbers that point to words in the Declaration of Independence
13. Cribs and Keywords (Bletchley Park): the codebreaker's trick of the guessed word
14. The Cryptogram Room: 52 cryptoquotes, 16 Warm (three letters given), 18 Steady (one given) and 18 Stern (none)

What makes it easy to use

• Large print throughout. Stories, instructions, hints and answers are set at 16 point or larger, code letters at about 21 point, with boxes big enough to write in and working space on most puzzle pages.
• Taught from zero. Every method has a "How it works" page with a solved example; the cryptogram chapter walks one puzzle through four steps and gives seven ways in.
• Everything for a puzzle is on its page: the alphabet strip, the Polybius square, the Morse chart, the pens, the figures you know, or a key with the count of every code letter already done for you.
• Two hints for every puzzle, in two separate sections, so you never see the second by accident. The first gets you started; the second gives a whole word.
• Answers in number order, each with the full key and where the quotation comes from. Page numbers for the hints and the answer are printed at the foot of every puzzle, and are tappable in a PDF reader.
• Quotations you can trust. 117 puzzles hide a real quotation from 29 writers and books, among them Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Twain, Lincoln, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll and Conan Doyle. Every one was matched word for word, by computer, against an early printed text, and the answer page says which book and which chapter. Every work quoted is in the public domain.
• Checked by computer. A program decoded every puzzle again from the printed data and made 1,256 checks: every message decodes to exactly its answer, no letter ever stands for itself in a cryptogram, every hint is true, and every given letter is right.

Your files

• The Large-Print Codebreaker (PDF, 241 pages, colour, US Letter), with bookmarks and links from every puzzle to its hints and answer.
• The Codebreaker's Kit (PDF, 12 pages, black on white): a cipher wheel to cut out and pin together, the Polybius square, Morse chart, pigpen pens, Vigenère square, the numbered Declaration, a crib sheet, blank cryptogram worksheets and a sheet for writing your own secret messages.
• A ZIP with both PDFs and a short start-here note.

Good to know

• The PDFs are for printing or writing on with a tablet's pen. They are not fillable forms.
• Pages are US Letter. On A4 paper, print with "fit to page."
• Spelling is American in the book's own text; quotations keep their authors' spelling.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.