(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.

LONOE

I must admit to being slow to recognise the significance of this map, I saw it a few days ago from a comment by Tonzi in the Cipher Explanations page and didn't realise what it was.

If you haven't finished the book yet you may not want to read on.

Then last night @MyTheseus on Twitter pointed out a new blog post on WhoIsStraka.WordPress.com which had the same conclusion, although arrived at via a different thought process.

Firstly the map is quite important as it explains the relationship of the coordinate system to the codes used, they are linear as you can see and these aren't locations from the book, these are all coordinates that can be found when LONOE is in the wheels window.

When you look at the map you can see that Maraú in Brazil (blue pin) is close to this line, on the postcard dated the 20th of April (insert on page 201) Eric writes that he is near this place.



So the conclusion is that the missing letters L O N O E are actually a pointer to the location of FXC should Straka have ever picked up the message hidden in the footnote cipher.

Tonzi very kindly created this as a Google map for us all to use and see this linear relationship.

Footnotes and Ciphers

The footnotes below were imported from ebook of Ship of Theseus as text and without formatting found in actual book or ebook. The formatting may be important to understanding some of the ciphers, so please refer to published versions for exactness.

This post may containing spoilers, notes on ciphers solved and those on which we are working. Color coding as been added for better understanding.

You can reach us at sfiles22blog @ gmail dot com.