(S)pecial Delivery

A little while ago Mulholland Books announced that there were making a reading group kit available to help you and your friends discuss S.

We have heard of a few kits arriving, but now we have one of our own.

The first thing to note is a letter from J.W. Dominguez who is the mysterious author of the Eotvoswheel.com website which has a large amount of information on V M Straka and who the potential candidates of Straka's identity may be.

Speaking of the website, part of it is reproduced in a special dossier, the front page of which is a reproduction of the Ship of Theseus cover (first picture).

The letter goes on to say there are instructions for solving a playfair cipher, which slightly disappointingly is the same cipher used for the Mulholland Books competition around the time that S. was launched, but it is a good one for people that haven't seen it yet.

Thee are a couple of erasable coloured pencils so that you can add your own notes to Jen and Eric's

There is also, as is becoming "the tradition" with S., a postcard, of Brazil. The postcard has a custom 'S' stamp which is a very nice touch.

Interestingly other people who have received the kit have reported that they received different postcards, and the original image of the kit published to advertise it shows a different card again.

However all the different cards seem to be images of Rio de Janeiro, which in itself may be significant.

The letter from J.W. Dominguez says "we encourage you to write and mail a postcard to Straka's translator, F. X. Calderia." The letter also says they will collect the cards and post them online.

I don't think this will be restricted to just the cards sent out in the kits, so if you can send a postcard of your own to the address in the picture I think it would be a great idea.

The final part of the kit is a CD with the first Radio Straka transmission on it, we haven't listened yet to see if it is different to the broadcast version on NTS Radio, but if there are any differences we will let you know.

The last paragraph of the letter says "I've never got a straight answer about how Mullholland books got hold of Jen and Eric's annotated copy of Ship of Theseus, but I'm glad they did. It's been a tremendous boon to Straka scholarship. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have"

Just want to finish up by saying what an excellent way of encouraging people to read S. with friends this is and it is great to see that S. has not been just published and forgotten, but is still actively being thought about.

S. Reading Group Kit

In case you missed the announcement on Twitter, Mulholland Books announced a Group Reading Kit that people can request to help them read S. with friends.

The kit looks rather cool and contains physical versions of some of the things we have seen online, like material from the Eotvos Wheel website, and a CD of the first Radio Straka broadcast.

There are even a couple of coloured pencils to make your own book notes in.

We think there may be the odd extra clue thrown in with the kit, as you can see from the picture there is a cipher to solve and a postcard. Fellow S. blogger Debbie has analysed the postcard and the image is "Rio de Janeiro, Public Park and Monroe Palace, Brazil" possibly related to the world fair in 1939.

The kit is only available for those in the United states and only available while stocks last, so if you want one, I would get requesting quickly.

Click here to visit the Mulholland Books website and request your own copy of the kit.

I am not in the UK myself, but I have friends in the US that have ordered one so we will see the contents once they arrive.

(Apologies for not posting this here sooner, I got rather ill recently and simply forgot !)

Barrel Code

Since the solution for the Chapter 10 code has been found it seems logical to me that there is another code in Chapter 10 that needs resolving.

As with other posts like this, don't read this full content if you don't want to know what the code might be or see the discussion on how to solve it that might get posted in comments.

Footnotes 9-10

Thinking about the Eotvos Wheel and potential clues to the code to decode it these two footnotes jumped out at me.

They are the only two chapters with footnotes 9 and 10 on the same page, and they do seem to allude to a code of some sort. That combined with the Eotvos Wheel website saying lots of Santorini man pages were 9-10 is looking more like a deliberate pointer rather than a coincidence.

Page 225 Footnote 9 again has an instance of 19 - "He argued that while these were separate conceptions of individual identity, they were equally true, as were seventeen other “Lesser Variant-Selves” between those two endpoints."

Jen also underlines the name and two dates "Mariusz Mytych (b. 1853 or 1854)" she says Mytych doesn't exist and that the 60 + 24 are what is important, which don't correspond to the dates that are part of the Nihilist Cipher used in that chapter.

Page 225 footnote 10, the only thing that seems significant is - "I do not know whether Straka would have agreed, but one could argue that this conflict is at the very heart of the book you are now reading." Possibly alluding to an underlying mystery.

I can't read anything relevant into Footnote 9 on page 270, so if anyone has any theories please let us know.

Looking at footnote 10 on page 270 I think the relevant part of the footnote is - "but modifying its suite of disorientations to include the additional dimension of Time"

A possible reference to the date being significant to the code being deciphered as well as the longitude and latitude of the locations we have seen, both in the Santorini Man murder locations and the locations in Ship of Theseus.

Where does this leave us ? not very far forward I'm afraid I have tried combinations of the date year to get a digit between 1 and 5 to read a single letter from the wheel code, but have not managed to find any combination or calculation that is plausible. Of course we may need to take the whole line of the code at the selected location and use them in something like a Railfence or Play fair cipher as people have suggested, however this would drastically limit the amount of coded messages that the wheel could produce for us.

Any suggestions and theories on this are more than welcome.

Eotvos Wheel Website Update

A few short hours of sleep between investigating the mysteries of S. and look what happens.

It seems that all our efforts have been noticed by J.W.Dominguez and he / she has decided to post some more updates on the Eotvos Wheel Website.

Apparently it has been a rough few years since the last post there, but the current level of interest has prompted a new post.

The information is split into two parts, first some information created a few years ago, but never published, but then the second half has some more recent information.

The information is all about the Santorini Man which we first learned about via Radio Straka, there were two waves of killings that fitted the same pattern, a man is washed up on shore with a page from one of V M Straka's books.

There is an evidence photograph of the first Santorini man and @0bFuSc8 on twitter has said the Greek words are - Ιούλιος = July Σαντορίνη = Santorini and we have another 19 reference - 19th of July 1936.

In fact the post mentions the appearance of 19 as some of the pages in the pockets of these men are 9-10.

@0bFuSc8 also mentions that "There's discrepancy b/n book & website. p74 SoT Eric says page found is from Miracle at Braxenholm" - Is this a deliberate mistake or a clue ?

@WorkroomB19 also reminds us that Radio Straka mentions the Braxenholm page in connection with the Santorini Man.

However the most recent update is that there may be a third wave of killings happening right now (that is underlined on the site !).

There is another evidence picture on the site and quite a large list of places and dates for us to look at.

If you have any theories as to the significance of this new information then please let us know in the comments.

Eotvos Wheel Code

So we have an Eotvos Wheel, but what do we do with it ?

Good question, Jen and Eric discuss this early on in the book on page 3 -

It is then mentioned again on page 270

This isn't a discussion of the Eotvos Wheel website, but I wouldn't be surprised if the site is linked in some way as it seems too much of a coincidence not to be.

Eotvos Wheel Website

If you were looking through S. and wondered what an Eotvos Wheel is then you are not alone.

In the general discussion comments Just Thinking mentioned that after performing a search for this term, which appears on page 3, a rather interesting website is listed - http://eotvoswheel.com/

This website is titled - "Dossier of V.M. Straka" so I'm fairly sure it is safe to say it is firmly within the world of S. and is something extra for us to look at.