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This celebrated renaissance book on codes and cryptography (largely derived from the earlier Steganography of Trithemius) presents a comprehensive survey of encryption and code-breaking methods, including examples of substitution ciphers, musical ciphers, steganography (the embedding of secret messages in a larger text), graphical encryption in images, and other techniques. The book has some notoriety in the (seemingly endless) Shakespeare-Bacon authorship debate. Francis Bacon was a skilled cryptographer. The title page has been interpreted as a visual code depicting Bacon (at the desk at bottom) writing the plays, which are then handed to a courier (right center), who delivers them to 'shakespear' (the man with the spear and the actor's buskins, left center).
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