Review: The Book of Codes edited by Paul Lunde

by Chriss Cornish published: April 5, 2010 No Comments

This Book Is About

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.

My Thoughts On This Book

The Book of Codes is a great visual-encyclopedia style work; well and thoroughly illustrated with an abundance of photographs, examples, sign diagrams, and figures. The information is presented graphically, with clear areas of easy-to-pick out topics. Very simple and comfortable to both read and quickly pick out information. All in all, Codes is a great book for a wide range of people; writers seeking a reference, cryptography fans, military history buffs, archaeologists, anthropologists, and those who just like cool information.

There are two things that I really like about this book. The first is that it covers a VERY wide range of topics, many of which the reader never thought of as containing codes such as road signs and the periodic table. The second is how well the information is divided. Colored boxes, large bold subject headings, smaller bold figure headers, text spacing, etc. are all used to great effect to create a graphic layout for all the multiple areas of data each two-page spread covers.

The goal of The Books of Codes is not to tell all about every tiny facet of all codes, but to convey an informed overview so the reader has a starting point for continuing or refining their researches. To this end, each individual topic covers just two pages, and in that single spread is packed as many subtopics as possible.

For instance, the “Semaphore And The Telegram” two-page spread in the Communicating at a Distance section concisely touches the subtopics of The Mechanical Semaphore, Semaphore Using Flags, The “Help!” Beatles Album Cover, Electric Telegraphy, The Needle Telegraph Receiver, and Railway Semaphore Systems.

Chapter List
The First Codes Reading the Landscape Tracking Animals Bushcraft Signs Early Petroglyphs First Writing Systems Reading Cuneiform Alphabets and Scripts The Evolution of Numerical Systems Linear A and Linear B The Phaistos Disc The Mystery of Hieroglyphs Hierophlyphs Revealed The Riddle of the Maya Indigenous Traditions	Sects, Symbols, And Secret Societies Early Christians The Pentangle Divination Heresies, Sects, and Cults Rosslyn Chapel Alchemy Kabbalism Necromancy Rosicrucians Freemasons Codes for Secrecy The Art of Concealment For Your Eyes Only Frequency Analysis Disguising Ciphers Medieval Cipher Systems The Babington Plot Ciphertexts and Keys Grilles Spies and Black Chambers Mechanical Devices Hidden in Plain Sight
Communicating at Distance Long-distance Alarms Flag Signals Semaphore and the Telegraph Morse Code Person to Person Codes of War Classical Codes of War The ‘Indecipherable’ Code The Great Cipher 19th-Century Innovations Military Map Codes Field Signals The Zimmerman Telegram Enigma: The ‘Unbreakable’ System WW II Codes and Code Breakers Cracking Enigma Navajo Windtalkers Cold War Codes	Codes of the Underworld Street Slangs From Samurai to Yakuza Cockney Rhyming Slang The Mob Ramblers’ Sign Language Cops and Codes The Zodiac Mystery The Zodiac Legacy Graffiti Youth Codes Digital Subversion
Encoding The World 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 Using the Genetic Code	Codes Of Civilization Codes of Construction Taoist Mysticism Souh Asian Sacred Imagery The Language of Buddhism The Patterns of Islam Mysteries of the North Medieval Visual Sermons Stained Glass Windows Renaissance Iconography The Age of Reason Victoriana Textiles, Carpets, and Embroidery
Codes of Commerce Commercial Codes Brands and Trademarks Maker’s Marks Codes of Work Currency and Counterfeits The Book In Your Hands	Codes of Human Behavior Body Language Suirvival Signs Sporting Codes Etiquette Dressing Your Message Heraldry Formal Dress Codes Decoding the Unconscious The Language Of Dreams
Visual Codes Signs And Signage Highway Codes Challenged Communication Describing Music Musical Scores Animal Talk Extraterrestrials	Imaginary Codes Modern Magic and Mayhem The Bible Code The Beale Papers Mystery and Imagination Fantasy Codes Doomsday Codes
The Digital Age The First Computers Supercomputers Talking to Computers Alice, Bob, and Eve Future Machines Where Are Codes Talking Us?