mike_r wrote:Hi-
I have been thinking just that all morning. The only thing that was bothering me is that he wrote the back of the Chronicle letter with the same thick pen he used for the front. I was imagining that had he decided a day or whatever later to add a second side to that letter, so as to describe his idea of breaking up the code in three, then why didn't he use the same pen he was using to write the other two letters for the second side of the Chronicle letter? If he had misplaced the thick one after making his decision and only had the thin one he used on the VTH and Examiner letters, why didn't he write the second side of the Chronicle letter with the thin one? Conversely, if he had both available to him, why didn't he write the other two letters with the same pen he used for the Chronicle letter?
However, note that in the VTH and Examiner letters, the references to the cipher are on the FIRST page of each. In the Chron letter, he does not reference the cipher until the back of the letter. So that could have been an add-on idea after he had written the original Chron letter. I wonder if he originally planned to use the "O" in "Over" to make his symbol but changed gears after writing the letter and decided to include the cipher, so he just converted it to the word "Over."
A bit perplexing.
Mike
I apologize if others have suggested this interpretation already in this thread but I'm being lazy and these are my thoughts on this question.
Firstly I would be wary of pen thicknesses when it comes to the VTH letter. From my POV the VTH letter as we see it is a duplicate and as such it's not accurately possible to compare pen thicknesses with the other two letters. In all likelihood what we see with the VTH letter may be close so we could guess but there's a rounding and a blurring on the characters that suggest to me that we have copy bleed so we could be seeing a reduction of a thicker pen stroke through copying or a distortion of a thinner pen stroke or both.
A minor point maybe but pertinent if we use it to ascertain order.
As for the Over. I'm not an expert of the finer points of letter construction but it would seem to me that this defines a break in information flow. At least in this communication. So, since the initial information ends on page one there would be a need for the Over to be included as it could appear that the information ends at the bottom of the first page, This is not so with the other two letters which do not conclude so neatly at the bottom of the first page so you could then be compelled to turn the letter over and find the remainder.
This is almost a mute point though in practicality as it would be human nature to check the other side and there would be show-through, as we've seen evidence of. So, the purpose of the over is a splitting of information. It may be at this point, the completion of the second page of the first letter, that the show-through was evident in all it's glory to the author, hence then lack of need to include such an instruction on the remaining letters.
That's why I would think and agree with others, that the Chron letter was written first.
Also to corroborate this splitting of information, he actually draws a line on the other two letters to do just that. What the end of the page had accomplished in the first letter was later replaced by a dividing line due to the fore-shortening of the information on the page. Another reason to suspect that the Chron came first as it was more considered concerning use of space.
Posted: Tue May 07, 2013 2:49 am