The Cipher Codex

The Cipher Codex — Literary Ciphers, Codes & Signals, from the great books of the public domain. A volume of forty puzzles from The Gift Vault, a shop of The Oakhaven Archive, curated by E.S. Oakhaven.

Every puzzle in this book decodes to a real line from a real book. Forty passages, taken word for word from public-domain literature — Jane Eyre, Dracula, Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the poems of Emily Dickinson — and hidden under sixteen different ciphers. Break the cipher, and the literature is your reward.

Sixteen methods: Caesar shift, Atbash, number ciphers, Baconian, tap code, Morse code, flag semaphore, pigpen, Polybius square, rail fence, scytale, keyword cipher, Vigenère, anagrams, acrostics, and book ciphers.

You are not left alone with them. The book opens with the Cipher-Maker's Primer: all sixteen methods taught with worked examples, charts, a tabula recta, and a Codebreaker's Crib Sheet. Each puzzle stands one to a page, with ruled workings space beneath it, and every puzzle footer tells you the exact pages for its method, its hints, and its answer. The Hint Sheet gives three tiers of hints for every puzzle, with a Solver's Log to keep your records. The Answer Key at the back gives every solution with its source and a note. Difficulties run from Approachable to Challenging.

You get all four editions in one download: A4 Colour (69 pages), A4 Black & White (69 pages), US Letter Colour (69 pages), and US Letter Black & White (69 pages). Print the colour edition for the full effect, or a black-and-white edition to spare your ink.

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New to the Archive? Begin with The Missing Scribe's Handover — a free dossier from the night desk, and the door into the Archive's correspondence: https://the-oakhaven-archive.kit.com/handover

— Bundles —

Get it in the bundle: The Whole Archive — Everything Bundle — https://itch.io/s/216378/the-whole-archive-everything-bundle (buy-all price $310.97)