The Cryptogram

THE STORY: A young boy, John, comes downstairs to tell about his upcoming trip with his dad to the family friend, Dell. Mother, Donnie, is in the kitchen making tea. Soon the three are discussing the excitement of the trip, why John can't sleep, an

In this gripping short play, David Mamet combines mercurial intelligence with genuinely Hitchcockian menace. The Cryptogram is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing—the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers. On a night in 1959 a boy is waiting to go on a camping trip with his father. His mother wants him to go to sleep. A family friend is trying to entertain them—or perhaps distract them. Because in the dark corners of this domestic scene, there are rustlings that none of the players want to hear. And out of things as innocuous as a shattered teapot and a ripped blanket, Mamet re-creates a child terrifying discovery that the grownups are speaking in code, and that that code may never be breakable.

Test your wits with a cryptogram for every day of the year! Start the year with this one: FXA SRZ YNJIJS UC SRZ YZXYUT VOXEEZT AUHI RZXIS XTE TUHIJYR AUHI YUHO. (MAY THE SPIRIT OF THE SEASON GLADDEN YOUR HEART AND NOURISH YOUR SOUL). Solutions are cleverly scattered to prevent easy cheating. 128 pages, 5 3/8 x 8 1/4.

"A collection of 400 witty or humorous quotations along with their authors' names...have been enciphered into simple substitution ciphers with retained word divisions. Authors include Groucho Marx, Andy Rooney, Bill Cosby, David Letterman, Bob Hope, Emma Bombeck and many more....Excellent and...fun."--Cryptologia. If stuck, get help from special clue sections. 128 pages, 5 3/8 x 8 1/4.

Almost since writing was invented there has been a desire to hide some of what was written from prying eyes. State secrets, commercial information, love letters and much else have been considered too sensitive to be left around for others to read. The answer was to write the material in a code that was known only to those who were allowed to be in on the secret. Inevitably, as soon as codes were invented there was a demand for people who could break them and unlock potentially valuable secrets. Code-breaking calls for great reserves of ingenuity and guile. Have you got what it takes? This is where you find out. Pit your wits against some of the greatest code writers of all time and see whether you can penetrate their secrets.

Reproduction of the original: The Cryptogram by James de Mille