K4 and After

Richard Byrne

— 2 min read
Detail from the Voynich Manuscript, Beinecke Library, Yale University (Public Domain)
Voynich Manuscript. Beinecke Library. Yale University. (Public Domain)

In November, I will have been publishing in newspapers and on websites for 40 years. But rarely have I been the subject of news coverage.

That changed last Thursday when the New York Times published a story about my small but essential role in the recovery of the "plaintext" of the long-unsolved K4 strand of the Kryptos statue. (The story ended up above the fold in Friday's print edition.)

My colleague and friend Jarett Kobek (author of many books you should read) noted a mention of the Smithsonian Institution in the catalogue listing for an auction of the solution to the puzzle. (He has been interested in K4 for a number of years.)

He asked me to go and have a look. When combined with essential clues given by the artist/seller over the past few years, raw material in the archive allowed Kobek to complete the recovery.

Kobek put it perfectly:

“This is a problem everybody has been attacking as a STEM problem,” Mr. Kobek said in an interview, referring to the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics that underlie cryptography. Cryptographic science, he argued, could not solve Kryptos — “but library science could.”
Ralphie cracks the Ovaltine code in A Christmas Story. (1983)

Want a deeper dive? Have a look at a wonderful interview that the amazing indie literary website Zona Motel conducted with myself and Kobek.

We walk listeners through our own misprision and groping as we happened upon this recovery. (Again: Our efforts were open source, and not cryptographic.) We also talked a bit about codes and journeys to uncover their meaning in 2025.

At one point in the interview (1:08:00), I observed:

As human beings, we build artifice to have such incredible import.... If you put too much weight on it, it can fall on you.
Image from Davy Crockett's Almanac, circa 1830s.

Many other projects at Richard Byrne, Inc. are finally approaching completion.

  • Beauty Doesn't Reach Me will appear under the We Heard You Like Books imprint in late winter 2026.
  • Plans are afoot to present Congressman Davy - a musical I have written with Dean Schalbowske (Waco Brothers, Deano and Jo) - to a broad audience before America's Sesquicentennial in July 2026. You will hear more about that very soon, but you can listen to Deano and Jo's rendition of "Poison Pens" right now on Bandcamp.

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