Book Review: Cryptic

Gary J. Shaw, Cryptic: from Voynich to the angel diaries, the story of world's most mysterious manuscripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025. ISBN: 9780300266511. 

Genre: antiquarian, books, esoterica

Subgenre: history 

Format: hardcover

Source: Hutchins Library, Berea College 

 

This book is a history of mysterious and puzzling texts; it focuses on nine medieval and early modern European works. Very often these texts were partially or fully written in cipher or code. Some are real, and others may be a hoax. The authors often had reasons ranging from vanity to professional necessity for hiding their content in the texts. Some codes could be broken easily but others to this day remain a mystery. Along the way the author presents the history of coded writings, magical and esoteric texts, medieval science and medicine, and more. If you like a good mystery, and you like reading about esoteric texts, this may be a book for you.

The book features an introduction, 10 chapters, extensive notes, and a bibliography plus a list of illustrations. The book has a variety of black and white illustrations plus a set of color plates. Some of the texts included are: 

• Sister Hildegarde's writings. 
• The Voynich Manuscript. 
• John Dee's Angel Diaries.

As a whole, this is an interesting book. The author looks at a text, and then we get to look at the text writer's life followed by a look at the context of the time and history around a document or book. By looking at the historical context we can better understand the books discussed. The author does a very good job helping us see how people lived at the time and how that helped inspire the text creators. 

What the book focuses on: 

"Consequently, Cryptic focuses less on the methods and used by people in the past to hide information, and more on the individuals themselves and what they chose to keep secret. As we shall see, their hidden knowledge covers a wide variety of themes, from the occult, alchemy, and religion, to science, engineering, and medicine" (1).

 The Voynich Manuscript remains a mystery to this day. Naturally this book's author feels the need to present his theory about it. In doing so, he provides an image of what a 15th century educated reader and book collector was like, what they likely knew and read. That part I found particularly interesting. 

But wait, there is more. John Dee and Edward Kelly swapping wives because the angels told them to do it, in 1857, is certainly worth the price of admission so to speak.  

While the book is a solid scholarly work, and interesting to read, it can feel a little repetitive towards the end as the author is wrapping up the book. 

This may be a book more for academic libraries, especially libraries in liberal arts colleges and large research institutions with strong collections in the humanities. It may also be of interest to medieval history and studies programs. Some library and information science libraries may find it of interest. 

Some larger public libraries may see this as optional. For smaller public libraries, this may be a bit too esoteric for most of their readers. 

Overall, I really liked it, and if you find the topic interesting I recommend it. 

4 out of 5 stars. 

Additional reading notes: 

Items from the book's bibliography I may want to read later, adding to my TBR list: 

• Arianrod, Thomas Harriot: a life in science. Oxford UP, 2019. 
• Fanger, Invoking Angels: Theurgic ideas and practices, thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Penn State University Press, 2012. 
• Laycock, The Complete Enochian Dictionary. Weiser, 3rd. ed. 2023. 
• Peterson, John Dee's Five Books of Mystery. Weiser, 2003. 
• Pettegree, The book in the Renaissance. Yale UP, 2010. 

  

This book qualifies for the following 2025 Reading Challenge: 

 

Book Review: The Newspaper Axis

Kathryn S. Olmsted, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.  ISBN: 978-0-300-25642-0.

Genre: history

Subgenre: journalism, politics

Format: hardcover

Source: Hutchins Library, Berea College

 

This book looks at six newspaper moguls during the 1930s and World War II who basically used their newspaper empires to appease Hitler, promote fascism, and keep the United States and Great Britain as isolationist nations.

The six news barons are: 

• Lord Harold Rothermere (UK).
• Lord Max Beaverbrook (UK). 
• William Randolph Hearst (US). 
• Robert McCormick (US).
• Joseph and Cissy Patterson (US)

 

Before television and social media, newspapers were how people got their news. They would even publish multiple daily editions to satisfy demand and keep up with the fast news pace. Keep in mind that newspapers competed also with newsreels and the emerging radio. In fact, Hearst owned a newsreel company. But radio was fairly free at this point, so Americans trusted it more. This allowed FDR to use it well to counter the isolationists and their newspapers.

The book includes an introduction, eleven chapters, and an epilogue. 

The book looks at two news barons in Great Britain and four in the United States. These moguls not only did their best to stifle the war effort when war came, but they also planted the seeds of the right wing extremist media machine we have today. A strength of the book is in how it allows readers to see parallels to today. The question is if people will ever heed the lessons. Looking at the current media landscape, the situation is not encouraging. 

By the way, the book is not just dry history. There are some juicy bits like Lord Rothermere's involvement with Princess Stephanie Hohenlahe, a likely Nazi spy according to British Intelligence. Rothermere kept her on salary. When he later cut her salary off, she sued, and it gets more intense from there.

The book overall is pretty interesting. The narrative alternates between Great Britain and the United States, and it is well balanced from both sides of the pond. The narrative pace is good. This is a book that you pick up and want to keep reading. For many readers, myself included, this is a part of history not often addressed. It is a history of journalism, but it is also a look at history in the early to mid-20th century. 

I really liked this one. The narrative is interesting, and the history is well researched. I found particularly interesting the parallels to today, and that makes it a very good reason to pick this book up. 

4 out of 5 stars. 

Additional reading notes: 

What their newspapers favored, not unlike so much media today: 

"These modern newspapers favored spectacle over substance, celebrity over leadership, and polemics over sober debate. The most successful publishers discovered that they could attract readers by highlighting race, nation, and empire-- themes that their advertisers could also support" (3). 

Amount of readers at one time: 

"Estimating four readers per copy, it is likely that the McCormick/Patterson press reached more than 12 million Americans daily and 20 million on Sundays. Hearst had 30 million readers, and the Mail and the Express together counted about 16 million British readers. As tensions in Europe reached crisis levels in the late 1930s, more than 60 million people in both countries got their news from those isolationist papers" (8).

What the book does: 

"This is the first book to analyze how British and American press lords worked together to delay and undermine the Anglo-American alliance against Hitler. A transnational approach, as opposed to a focus on a single nation, reveals common arguments, beliefs, and language in the debate about resisting Nazism. An Anglo-American analysis can help us better understand where 'isolationism' comes from, how the term was used, and what it meant" (8). 

It is important to note here, and the book discusses this further, that the barons actively coordinated with each other. They even published each others' editorials in their own newspapers to sway public opinion on both sides of the pond. 

A challenge to scholars, and this reinforces something I often tell my students: not everything is online nor digitized. Note that access can often dictate what can be researched or not: 

"Scholars have found it challenging to evaluate the coverage of these newspapers because of the difficulty of accessing them. Despite the immense reach of the Hearst press and of the New York Daily News, for example, archivists only recently digitized these papers and added them to major databases. Some important newspapers, such as the Washington Times-Herald, are still available only on microfilm as of early 2021. Thus researchers have, quite understandably, focused more on the digitized Washington Post than the better selling Times-Herald" (13). 

And that does not even address that those databases are commercial products that can be prohibitively expensive for libraries and/or archives to provide. So even if it exists digitally, access may or not be available. 

And then, there are researcher biases: 

"Historians have also tended to dismiss the more popular papers because they were rowdier, angrier, and generally less respectable than their more sedate rivals. Because these publications were overtly anti-intellectual, it's easy to overlook them as key sources of ideas" (13). 

Another lesson there may be you ignore certain media at your peril. 

Even in the 1930s, folks, conservatives like Hearst, worried about those lefty professors: 

"He was particularly worried about left-wing professors who, in his view, spewed hate and had too much power to mold young minds. Almost two decades before Senator Joe McCarthy began his Red hunts, Hearst ordered 'that names, pictures, and activities of disloyal professors and others should be printed continually and commented upon' in his papers" (45).

And you still see that sort of thing today. 

 

Book qualifies for the following 2024 Reading Challenge: 

 

Book Review: Stalin's Library

Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Library: a Dictator and His Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.  ISBN:  9780300179040.

 

Genre: libraries, biography, politics

Subgenre: history, Russian, Soviet Union

Format: hardcover

Source: Via Interlibrary Loan through Hutchins Library, Berea College. The book came from Alcuin Library, St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota.  

 

(Review crossposted from Notes from a Simple Librarian.)

 

If memory serves me right, I saw this book mentioned somewhere on social media. I like reading about books and libraries, so this book seemed to fit the bill. The book has an introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, notes, and a further reading list. 

To be honest, this book is really a political biography of Stalin with a bit of a literacy narrative. We learn that Stalin was an avid and attentive reader. He read extensively, and he read books within his ideologies as well as books by his rivals and enemies. Stalin also read some works from other countries in Russian translation. 

We know a lot about Stalin as a reader from the remnants of his personal library. I say remnants because Stalin's personal library was dispersed after his death. Stalin was an active reader, and he made a lot of notes in his books as he read. This marginalia gives us insight into Stalin's thoughts on various topics and issues. In addition, Stalin was an active editor of documents, his and other people's documents, and scholars have studied these documents too. 

The most interesting part of the book is the look at Stalin's library, the kinds of books he collected and read. The part about how Stalin arranged his books, or rather had a librarian do it for him, is also interesting. 

The rest of the book is mostly a political biography, and it is not always interesting. At times, this biography goes a bit much into minutiae. This can make the text a bit dense to read at times. Some readers may choose to skim through some of this material. 

I would say that much of this book feels more like an academic article or two on Stalin as a reader. At some point, someone decided to pitch a book, and the additional biographical material, which often is not connected to Stalin as a reader, feels like filler at times. The result is that the interesting topic of Stalin as a reader and his books gets lost in the rest of the text. 

For public libraries, this may be a book to skip. For academic libraries, large academic libraries with strong collections on the Soviet Union, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia might find this to be an optional selection. It may also be an optional selection for LIS/library school libraries. 

In the end, this was just OK. This is not really a book that can be read for pleasure.

2 out of 5 stars. 

* * * * * 

 

Additional reading notes: 

 

 What the book aims to do: 

"This book explores the intellectual life and biography of one of history's bloodiest dictators: Joseph Stalin. Uniquely, it does so through the prism of his personal library. A dedicated reader and self-improver, Stalin's accumulation of books was a lifelong passion" (1).

Part of me thinks that the line we often hear about how reading makes people better is not really true, at least not in all cases. In this case, just look at Stalin. 

 

How the book views Stalin, according to the author: 

"This book views Stalin through a different lens-- as a dedicated idealist and as an activist intellectual who valued ideas as much as power, who was ceaseless in his own efforts at self-education, a restless mind, reading for the revolution to the very end of his life" (6). 

Books are the best way to know Stalin's inner life: 

"Apart from private photographs and some hastily written and perfunctory letters to family members, Stalin's library books are among the best means we have of accessing the dictator's inner life" (15). 

Stalin seeing himself as an intellectual: 

"Stalin saw himself as neither a worker nor a peasant, but as, in effect, an intellectual whose task it was to spread enlightenment and socialist consciousness. It was this fundamental choice of an intellectual identity that motivated his fanatical, life-long commitment to reading and self-improvement" (48). 

Yet in a way Stalin read like many of us read: 

"Stalin read books in diverse ways-- selectively or comprehensively, cursorily or with avid attention. Some he read cover to cover, others he merely skimmed. Sometimes he would begin reading a book, lose interest after a few pages and jump from the introduction to the conclusion. Some books he read in a single sitting, others he dipped in and out of" (97). 

What Stalin's library reveals: 

"In truth, no smoking guns are to be found anywhere in the remnants of Stalin's library. His pometki reveal preoccupations not secrets, and the way he engaged with ideas, arguments, and facts" (101). 

A reason Stalin read a lot: 

"Admittedly, complexity, depth, and subtlety were not strengths of Stalin's nor was he an original thinker. His lifelong practice was to utilise other people's ideas, formulations and information-- that was why he read such a lot. His intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier, and populariser" (153).