Decoding Ancient Secrets: A mini zine about Mary Stuart’s cryptic letters
A couple of years ago, I saw an article in New Scientist magazine about a team of cryptologists who managed to decode some secret letters written by Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, in the 17th century.
The photos caught my eye: Ancient epistles scrawled with sepia-toned ink on yellowed paper, looking like gibberish, alongside a portrait of the hapless queen, who was fated to be executed for getting mixed up in a plot to assassinate her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. The story was like something out of a historical romance novel. It also reminded me of when I used to exchange letters with my cousin; I’m pretty sure we would sometimes invent a code, or pretend we were sending each other secret messages. I tore out the pages and saved them for future use in a collage.
This February, as I was making collages for a challenge called Februllage, conducted via Instagram, I put those images to use, along with other ephemera and a rubber stamp, for the final piece of the month, which had the prompt “crown.” I had forgotten by then about the article that had accompanied those pictures.
Forgotten, that is, until this spring, when I decided to join an exchange-by-mail of mini zines with the theme “secrets” (via a site called Swap-Bot).
A zine (pronounced zeen) is a handmade booklet, usually stapled, sometimes sewn, and sometimes folded from a single sheet of paper; this exchange called for the latter type, a simple booklet format that’s become quite popular, made from letter-size paper. Austin Kleon has a good description of how to make one.
The theme prompted me to recall that I had read something somewhere about Mary Stuart and some coded secret letters. I had dropped my subscription to New Scientist more than a year earlier and couldn’t remember where I had read about it. But a quick search online brought up multiple articles published in 2023 when the story was new, with even more terrific images of the cryptic letters as well as the cryptologists’ notes.
For the cover, I scanned the “crown” collage from February and made a couple of changes: replacing a postage stamp image of Queen Elizabeth II with QE I, and reducing it. I also assembled a few simple digital collages for the inside pages and boiled down the wealth of information I found into a short essay to fit the small format.
I listed a few sources on the “blank” side (the part that’s hidden inside the folded zine), and added a sample of the cryptologists’ notes to show a little of the complicated work those guys had done.
The zine is now available in my shop here, where you can see more views of it, and even buy it if you are so inclined.