The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages, An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages [Hardcover]

Paul Lunde (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0520260139 | ISBN-13: 978-0520260139 | Edition: 1

The art of the code—code making and code breaking—remains shrouded in mystery and seems locked away in the murky realms of military intelligence, spies, and secret services. Yet codes affect virtually every area of our lives, providing security, protecting identity, and enabling us to connect via the Internet across global boundaries. This lavishly illustrated encyclopedia surveys the history and development of code making and code breaking in all areas of culture and society-from hieroglyphs and runes to DNA, the Zodiac Killer, The Da Vinci Code, graffiti, and beyond. Beginning with the first codes, including those found in the natural world and among ancient peoples, the book casts a wide net, exploring secret societies, codes of war, codes of the underworld, commerce, human behavior, and civilization itself. Editor Paul Lunde and an extraordinary group of specialists have compiled the most comprehensive and complete collection of codes available. Visually stunning and packed with fascinating details, The Book of Codes tells the complete story of codes at a time when they have become fundamentally important to our lives.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Has value even for those with only casual interest. . . . Illustrated with an abundance of vintage and new imagery."--New York Times Book Review

"A marvelously enlightening book, impressively organized and highly recommended for all curious readers."--Library Journal

"Codes takes us from petroglyphs to genes-with hundreds of truly fascinating, sometimes disturbing, excursions en route."--Foreword

"Densely researched, beautifully illustrated."--St. Louis Post - Dispatch

"This is a fine book to bring reflection on just how secret or hidden or taken-for-granted codes run our lives."--Commercial Dispatch

About the Author

Paul Lunde is the author of Islam: Faith, Culture, History and Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World's Most Successful Industry and the coauthor of A Land Transformed, a history of Saudi Arabia.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520260139
• ISBN-13: 978-0520260139
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #68,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing and Rewarding Book, November 21, 2009

By 

E. Schell (Ventnor, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages, An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages (Hardcover)

This is an absolutely stunning book, not only lavishly illustrated but superbly designed with an engaging layout, thousands of photos, drawings, and illustrations, and a crisp, readable, entertaining (yet scholarly) text that ranges from introductory paragraphs and pithy labels to informed and informative sidebars.

I have to say right up front that at the Amazon price of $16.17, this book is an outrageous steal! It has coffee-table heft, is printed on heavy matte stock with rich inks, and sports a sewn-signature binding with cloth header strips with red and black stripes that match the book's cover colors. The hardbound cover matches the dust jacket, and the endpapers are an intriqsing amalgam of many of the symbols in the book.

This book is about so much more than "codes" or cryptography, although these subjects, of course, are very amply addressed. The book's thirteen chapters cover:

The First Codes
Sects, Symbols, and Secret Societies
Codes for Secrecy
Communicating at a Distance
Codes of War
Codes of the Underworld
Encoding the World
Codes of Civilization
Codes of Commerce
Codes of Human Behavior
Visual Codes
Imaginary Codes
The Digital Age

Each chapter is divided into six to twelve two-page spreads, each covering a separate sub-topic. Let's look deeper at a few of these.

Encoding the World includes Describing Time; Describing Form, Force and Motion; Mathematics: The Indescribable; The Periodic Table; Defining the World; Encoding the Landscape; Navigation; Taxonomy; The Genetic Code; Genetic Ancestry; and Using the Genetic Code.

Defining the World and Encoding the Landscape cover mapmaking ancient and modern, from The Peutinger Table of ancient Rome to remote sensing for producing Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) for modern cartography.

Taxonomy covers classification of all living things, followed by The Genetic Code (an excellent two-page summary, with bios of Watson and Crick in a sidebar) and Genetic Ancestry, with a sidebar on Vivisection and Eugenics.

The Chapter on Codes of Civilization has spreads covering Codes of Construction (architecture), Taoist Mysticism, South Asian Sacred Imagery, The Language of Buddhism, The Patterns of Islam, Mysteries of the North, Medieval Visual Sermons (with a whole page deciphering Boscsh's The Garden of Earthly Delights), Stained Glass Windows, Renaissance Iconography (a page on Holbein's The Ambassadors), The Age of Reason (with a caption for The Code Napoleon), Victoriana (a page on Hunt's The Awakening Conscience, explicating the moral lessons in an otherwise innocent scene), and Textiles, Carpets, and Embroidery (with a sidebar on Underground Railroad quilts).

One more example of this book's riches: Codes of Human Behavior starts with a spread on Body Language, mostly devoted to Poker Tells (with explanatory captions on a good photo example), plus a sidebar on how women used fans in 19th century Spain to telegraph a range of signals and emotions.

It is hard to imagine how you could go wrong buying this book. You will either get years of pleasure delving into it piece by piece (I doubt many will sit down and read it straight through) and coming back to it repeatedly, or you will somehow decide it isn't for you but will make an excellent gift for someone you know. There is no price imprinted on the dust jacket, so they'll think you spent big bucks for this magnificent volume.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars UIF CPPL PG DPEFT, December 30, 2009

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages, An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages (Hardcover)

When I picked up _The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages_ (University of California Press), edited by Paul Lunde, I thought I would be getting an explanation of different forms of cryptography, and perhaps the importance of secret messages in warfare, commerce, and diplomacy. I got all that, but the book takes off on the many meanings of the word "code." I hadn't thought about this before, but in his introduction, Lunde points out that "code" certainly can mean secret means of communication. It can also, in an almost opposite meaning, refer to an open and widely accepted means of communication, like a code of conduct or a dress code. There are other codes that used to be hidden to us until we used science to understand them, like the genetic code. Languages and writing systems meant for open communication are codes, but dead languages are particular cryptographic problems. Maps and signs are pictorial codes. There are plenty of other types of codes, and the person who is interested just in cryptography might suspect that the definition of "code" is being expanded into meaninglessness. However, this is a fine book to bring reflection on just how secret or hidden or taken-for-granted codes run our lives. With so many codes, each topic (like "Tracking Animals," "Currency and Counterfeits," or "Stained Glass Windows") only gets a couple of pages, but the book is large format (suitable for anyone's coffee table) and is laid out with bright pictures and pithy text on every page.

Start with codes deliberately made to keep prying eyes from understanding a message. The Caesar Shift Cipher was easy to use; if you want to encode letter A, shift it, for instance, four letters ahead to E, and shift all other letters similarly four steps. The resulting ciphertext will look like gibberish. It was easy to use (Caesar indeed did so), and all-too-easy to decode, because there are only 25 shifts that can be employed. To break it, just try each of them in turn. The cryptographic systems here progress in complexity, to the current ones that rely on huge prime numbers. When we do get around to producing quantum computers it seems that security will be perfect and unbreakable. Long distance communication is covered from smoke signals to URLs. There is a whole section on codes of the underworld. Emphasizing the duel meaning of the word "code," this section says, "Concealment is not the only consequence of cants and argots, they also create a sense of unity among their speakers." Some codes are not really codes. There are pages here on Doomsday Codes, like predictions by Nostradamus, and the bogus "End of Days" decoding of the Mayan calendar, the artificial decodings of _The Bible Code, and, of course, the Da Vinci Code.

_The Code Book_ is an extremely handsome grab bag of interesting information. I had not realized, for instance, that the pictographic symbol for a telephone always involves a handset sitting on a telephone body with a circular dial, even though few of us use such a phone nowadays. A schematic version of, say, a cell phone or an iPhone would not be nearly so universally recognizable. There is a revealing two pages on codes of Victoriana, including the languages encoded in particular gemstones or gifts of flowers. An explanation of the coded symbols in Holman Hunt's painting _The Awakening Conscience_ (like the flowers being columbine which represented fickleness and male abandonment) completely changes the initial reading of the picture. There is the encoding system for the tiffins, home-cooked meals sent out by the millions at lunchtime in Bombay, which is reputedly 100% efficient without getting orders confused. There are the codes used in the personal ad columns (GSOH stands for that essential, "good sense of humor"). There is a great deal more in this colorful and enlightening book, making the convincing case that we are all cryptographers all the time.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Book of Codes, Symbols, Pictures, Trivia, Errors, July 6, 2010

By 

Charles Bradley (Acton , MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages, An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages (Hardcover)

"The Book of Codes" is a well made book, but the content is not worth the
effort that went into presenting it. The problems start on the cover. What
appears to be the subtitle is "Understanding the World of Hidden Messages".
Most of the material in the book is about symbols, and most of that is about
symbols that are intended to be seen and to be understood. The sub-subtitle
is "An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages".
We have page after page of topics such as cave paintings, the stone age version
of "Kilroy was here.", stop signs from different countries, crop circles, and
the history of computer memory technology. Much of the material applies to
codes as symbolism, so we get examples from painting, literature, any many
religions. Much of the material applies to codes as organized bodies of rules
so we get informed about the Napoleonic Code, and building codes. Even mathematics
is a code. The cryptography component is not ignored. There is enough for a
short book, mostly historical but with enough details about methods for a good
magazine article. One might learn something about many fields from these
random topics. Or maybe not. There are very obvious errors. "...mass equaling
weight divided by volume." "a mole is a number" A Newton and a Joule are
defined only at the surface of the earth. An IBM card has 10 rows for data and
a control row above that, right next to a picture clearly showing all 12 rows.
Readers who are also consumers will miss some codes we wish we understood. How
can we translate the gibberish on the package into an expiration date? Lunde
can't tell us; there are a great many different codes. But he could have told
us about some of the common techniques.