I gotcher literary obscurantism right here.

The world's most mysterious book may be an unusually successful hoax. And over four centuries before James Joyce did the same thing with Ulysses, to boot.

The Voynich manuscript [...] is hand-written in a unique alphabet, about 250 pages long, and contains pictures of unrecognizable flowers, naked nymphs and astrological symbols. The manuscript first appeared in the late 1500s, when Rudolph II bought it in Prague from an unknown seller for 600 ducats - about 3.5 kilograms of gold, worth more than US$50,000 today. The book passed from Rudolph to noblemen and scholars, before disappearing in the late 1600s. It surfaced again around 1912, when US book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought it. The manuscript was donated to Yale University after Voynich's death.

No one has worked out whether Voynichese is a code, an idiosyncratic translation of a known tongue, or gibberish. The text contains some features that are not seen in any language. The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory. On the other hand, some aspects, such as the pattern of word lengths and the ways in which characters and syllables occur with each other, are similar to real languages. "Many people have believed that it is too complicated to be a hoax - that it would have taken some mad alchemist years to get such regularity," says Rugg.

But this complexity could have been produced easily, Rugg demonstrates, with an encryption device invented around 1550 called a Cardan grille. This is a table of characters. Moving a piece of card with holes cut in it over the table makes words. Gaps in the table ensure different-length words.

One of the men often suspected of selling the book to Rudolph II (Edward Kelley, "a forger, mystic, alchemist, mercenary and wife-swapper" - just like my Uncle Louie!) was known to use Cardan grilles. Whoever wrote it apparently knew enough about cryptography to make the text look plausible, yet extremely difficult to crack (if, in fact, there exists anything to crack). Since the pictures are of naked nymphs, no attempts at dating the text can be made based on clothing styles.

Sheesh. Next they're going to tell me the two metric tons of soda pop-tops in my toolshed aren't going to buy any dialysis sessions for that poor kid. I have a sneaking suspicion that when they finally do crack the code, the Voynich manuscript will start out: "Dear Sir, I am Mrs. Maryam Abacha, the widow of the late Gen. Sanni Abacha, former Nigerian Military Head of State..."