VMs: Three nice crypto books

["PK#01" <pklist01@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have borrowed the following two books from the Royal Library:

Meister , Aloys
Die Anfänge der modernen diplomatischen Geheimschrift : Beiträge zur
Geschichte der italienischen Kryptographie des XV. Jahrhunderts / Aloys
Meister
Paderborn : Schöningh
1902

Meister , Aloys
Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der Päpstlichen Kurie von ihren Anfänge bis zum
Ende des 16. Jahrhundert / Aloys Meister
Quellen und Forschungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte ; 11
Paderborn : Schöningh
1906
Mit fünf kryptographischen Schrifttafeln

They contain a very good overview of Italian cryptography from the
VMS-period. Examples of crypto are given from Florence, Rome, Modena, Venice
etc. I will gladly post them on my server but - the books are so old that
I'm afraid they'll break if I scan them in the usual way - at least I'll
probably break the spine in two.

1) Do you know these books?
2) Are you interested in a scan?
3) How do you handle/scan such brittle books?

In fact - they show clearly that in the VMS period all crypto was ceasarean,
or multi-ceasarean with at most a nomenclator and nulls. A lot of examples
are given, but they boil down to this. I saw some characters that remind me
of the strange signs in the circular, period 17, text (don't know which
folio it is at the moment). But I'd prefer that the old folks take a look at
that, after all those years I still'don't know all the VMS characters by
heart :-)

Then I also borrowed:

Hüttenhain , Erich
Die Geheimschriften des Fürstbistums Münster unter Christoph Bernhard von
Galen 1650-1678 / Erich Hüttenhain
Schriften der Historischen Kommission Westfalens ; 9
ISSN: 0933-2502
Münster : Aschendorff
1974

It shows that even 200 years after the VMS, practical crypto hadn't reached
anything more sophisticated than caesars, multiple caesars, nomenclators and
nulls.

4) How big it the chance that the VMS author discovered something completely
different, if the rest of the world used the same ideas over and over again
?

This is a modern book, so I'll make a PDF scan today.

5) Are you interested?
6) Does my private server work sufficiently well to post it there?

 I discovered that I was offline yesterday afternoon, but I'm again online
now. I saw in my logs that I had a lot of visitors to the Gratheus pictures.

Greetings, Petr

______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list