One of the most famous works on cryptography by the founder of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany

Gustavus Selenus [i.e., Augustus II, Duke of Brunswick]. Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri IX. In quibus & planissima steganographiae à Johanne Trithemio [...] olim conscriptae, enodatio traditur. Inspersis ubique authoris ac aliorum, non contemnendis inventis.

€ 25.000,00

First and only edition of one of the most renowned works on cryptography written by Augustus II, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1579-1666), founder of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel. Dedicated to Emperor Ferdinand II and printed in Lüneburg at the author’s expense by the brothers Johann and Heinrich Stern, this book is a comprehensive survey of various cryptographic techniques and methods of code-breaking, comprising for example steganography (the hiding of a message in a larger text) and encryption in musical scores. It is profusely illustrated with tables and schemes of alphabets and ciphers encoded in numerous variations, occasionally including signs of the zodiac. The text, divided into nine books, is partly based on the famous "Steganographia" of the German Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), which was first published in Frankfurt in 1606. The third book contains the unfinished part of Trithemius’s enigmatic text, whose the secret code was deciphered only late in the 20th century.

The intriguing engraved title border is generally regarded as the first pictorial clue in the controversial Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship, which contends that the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the true author of the plays written by William Shakespeare. One scene suggests Francis Bacon handing over a text to a man holding a spear (meaning Shakespeare), and another suggests Augustus II holding the "Cap of maintenance" above the head of Francis Bacon writing at his desk. Some authors believe this work to be a cryptographic twin to Bacon’s “De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum” and Shakespeare’s First Folio, both published in 1623.

Augustus II, born as the seventh child of Henry III, Duke of Brunswick-Dannenberg (1533-98), studied at the Universities of Rostock, Tübingen, and Strasbourg. After his Grand Tour of Italy, France, the Netherlands and England, he settled in 1604 in his residence in Hitzacker, continuing his studies for the next three decades. Under his pseudonym Gustavus Selenus he wrote an influential book on chess, “Das Schach- oder Königsspiel” (first published in Leipzig in 1616). He was one of the most learned men of his time and maintained a correspondence with the German theologian Johannes Valentinus Andreae (1586-1654), one of the founders of the Rosicrucian movement at the beginning of the 17th century.