RE: Folding Keys

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Claus,

f75v has what seems (to me) like a medium-sized gallows, compared to the 
long gallows of pages f48v, f84v, f84r, f87v, and f87r: but I think it'll 
be hard to tell what counts as a "real" long gallows until all the stats 
are in (and the taxonomy of gallows far more complete).

I had always been utterly convinced that long gallows were simply 
embellished - "of course they were", I'd have said - but the gallows 
halfway down on f37v has made me reconsider that.

But, thinking about it afresh, if the text _was_ encrypted, what would have 
been the point of embellishing one group of characters [the gallows] but no 
others?

If the text was encrypted, what would have been the point of embellishing 
*any* characters? In my experience, ciphertext is very hard to write by 
hand without mistakes, let alone to consider the extravagance of 
embellishing it as well. :-/

I'd be extremely interested to hear of any other curious gallows-related 
phenomena (for example, the "eyes" on f42v; or the possible gallows 
correction/mistake halfway down f37v) you notice anywhere in the VMS. Tiny 
details or inconsistencies can give away a disproportionate amount of 
information... so please observe carefully!

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....