Compete to crack secrets lost to history—for fun, clout, and (no) profit
The ordinary prose points to buildings on the view of Felton, California. Twelve geometric inserts interrupt it. A printed sword, handwriting, and watermark overlap parts of the signs; knowing the picture caption cannot substitute for deciding which strokes belong to a cipher cell.[1]
The preliminary transcription counted 83 cells. Native review reduced the final denominator to 79 after removing a flourish and prose strokes, restoring two compressed frames in one block and a merged frame in another, and correcting orientations. The attack used the corrected source table. The familiar row-major Pigpen alphabet was tested and rejected: at the second block it gave J[B/K]USC, not a coherent reading.[4]
The working convention assigns two adjacent letters to each frame. An undotted frame gives the first; an interior dot gives the second. The same rule applies to corners, open frames, boxes, and wedges. It is the standard paired-alphabet Pigpen convention, not a new system recovered for this card.
┘ A/B ⊔ C/D └ E/F ] G/H □ I/J [ K/L ┐ M/N Π O/P ┌ Q/R V S/T > U/V < W/X ^ Y/Z
| Block | Cells | Recorded geometry | Reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| B00 | 9 | ┐ ^ ⊔· └ ┘ ┌· └ V V· | MY DEAREST |
| B01 | 5 | ]· Π < V └ | HOWSE |
| B02 | 7 | ┐· Π < □ V └ V· | NOW I SET |
| B03 | 5 | Π· Π ┌· ⊔ ]· | PORCH |
| B04 | 4 | [· Π ┐· ] | LONG |
| B05 | 5 | ]· Π V· └ [· | HOTEL |
| B06 | 5 | V V· Π ┌· └ | STORE |
| B07 | 12 | ] ┌· ┘ ┐· ⊔· ⊔ └ ┐· V· ┌· ┘ [· | GRAND CENTRAL |
| B08 | 8 | V· < Π ] □ ┌· [· V | TWO GIRLS |
| B09 | 7 | ⊔ Π >· └ ┌· └ ⊔· | COVERED |
| B10 | 5 | [Π·; obscured] Π ┌· ⊔ ]· | [P]ORCH |
| B11 | 7 | [· □ ┘· ┌· ┘ ┌· ^ | LIBRARY |
Square brackets below distinguish the decoded inserts and uncertain ordinary handwriting; the double bracket in the second porch reference retains its damaged first sign.
Dear E. [MY DEAREST] [you know it.] Here it is. The little [HOWSE] here at the left is where [NOW I SET] I love that sign, [afternoon?], on the [PORCH] The [LONG] building at the side of the house is the [HOTEL] [STORE] The [Hotel?] has the sign on it. The [GRAND CENTRAL] [TWO GIRLS], [store?] + the [COVERED] [[P]ORCH] are on the right out of sight. The building with the x is where they have [LIBRARY]. It is nothing now. not full of old old magazines + papers. Last yr. they had [books?] but. [edge continuation mostly overwritten/faint: “... all been taken. We live ...”]
The later [P]ORCH shares its four clear final frames, occurrence for occurrence, with the earlier clean PORCH. That controls the reading of ORCH while leaving the overlay-filled initial P bracketed. Recurring O, R, and E signs retain the same values in the surrounding blocks. All 79 corrected cell positions are accounted for under one rule; the first three signs of MY DEAREST have lower source confidence under the printed sword.[4]
The writer encoded HOWSE and NOW I SET. “House” and “sit” are possible intended words, but changing HOWSE’s W to U would require a different physical wedge. The ordinary line is not full of old old magazines +, without a comma between the two olds; the earlier “but full” rendering is retracted. Pale prose and the overwritten edge continuation remain bracketed. Successful cipher decoding does not make the whole physical card legible.
The cancel gives Felton, 23 September 1913. The sender is unidentified, and the concealed MY DEAREST proves an endearment, not a particular courtship or household. HCP supplied no key or plaintext and marked the card “Not solved” on 29 August 2026. Bounded exact-ID, address, media-name, local-corpus, and web searches found no prior exact-item reading or demonstrated sibling. The novelty statement is confined to those checked sources.[3]