Mulholland Books Cipher Contest Answer

If you entered the Mulholland Books S. Cipher Contest you should have heard if you were a winner.

I was not, mainly because I am from the UK and was ineligible to enter ! However I did submit an entry and received an email to say that I was not a winner but had solved the cipher correctly. As the answer is now published on the Mulholland website I think we are safe to post the answer here as well.

The clue in the original question was of course "Follow these lines, from first to last, and play fair" so like in the book you take the first and last letters of the passages in the tweets - MC FR NM SH XM CS - and feed the result into a play fair cipher.

For the grid code word you need to use the next part of the clue "the bearded sailor sees all", the bearded sailor in S. is of course Maelstrom, which gives us this grid

MAELS
TROBC
DFGHI
KNPQU
VWXYZ

Using the Playfair cipher rules the result is - ST RA KA LI VE SZ, which gives us the answer "Straka Lives" (The z is a filler letter)

If you don't know the rules of Playfair, then there is this online version you can use to decode the message.

So apart from a bit of fun is this another clue ?

If you won the competition we would love to hear from you especially once you have claimed your prize and had your lunch with J J Abrams and Doug Dorst.

***UPDATE

We have heard from the winner, Kris from the BOLO Books website, he won and has had his lunch with Doug Dorst and J J Abrams.

Read all about his experience of this and the talk at Symphony Space on his BOLO Books write-up

A Catalog Of Letters

While searching for some more information I came across something on the Hachette Book Group Catalog page

There is a link to the catalog for the Little Brown and Company, it is rather a large PDF file (81.8 mb) but included in it are two snippets of interest.

The first is shown to the left, it is a general letter about future publishing, and includes this paragraph about S. -

"Our Fall 2013 list may well send you off the cliff. J.J. Abrams - one of our world's most creative, brilliant, and canny storytellers - leads the list with a collaborative novel with PEN Hemingway-nominate novellist Doug Dorst. It's a book that is so surprising we cannot reveal its contents. It's a story for J.J.'s millions of fans, a story for people who love books. I can promise that there is nothing in this book that will not surprise you."

The second letter is contained on the catalog page for the novel, I'll let you read it yourself, but it gives an insight into where the novel originated for J.J.

The only other real information on the page is that the book will be 352 pages long.