So I got to thinking, you know. They really have no option for the page numbers. Unless they're gonna be clearly wrong, the numbers themselves probably aren't important. They have to be on the one page, or the other.
And that got me thinking that maybe the page they were on was what was important, and not the way they could be added or multiplied. So, I wrote it out, just based on whether they were on an odd page or an even page. It looks like this:
OOOEOOOOOOE
So I turned that into a binary digit. Here it is:
11101111110
Sure enough, there's great significance in that specific number and it does tie into a lot of the artwork, specifically, November, elf:elf, and the languages on the page heads.
If we can agree that it is, in fact, significant, then the odds of arriving at that number randomly or accidentally are along the lines of 2000:1 against.
That's all I got so far. Someone mentioned Edward Elgar's enigma and it's been floating out in the void, and he did actually do a famous cipher called the Dorabella cipher (currently unsolved) which reminded me a lot of the page heads in how the information was encoded, so I've been turning that about.
The Dorabella CipherThe methodology behind the encryption isn't difficult to solve... he actually spelled out the method in a book if I recall where using an alphabet of 24 letters (Victorian, I'd presume, where I/J and U/V are paired), which is set up in 3 sets of 8.
ABCD EFGH
IKLM NOPQ
RSTV WXYZ
And then he'd make characters which contained one to three arcs, indicating which line the letter belonged to, and an orientation (one of the compass points), which defined which letter in that line.
This is possibly related to this frame of thought:
Orient yourselves a first time, then
Open your minds again a second time to truly move ahead In the placement of the page heads, I can see two sets of eight, and can a little less easily guess two sets of three, so there very well could be two ciphered messages there. The two sets of 8 are:
Compass Direction of the head (which way it's looking); and
Position on the page (but, are there 9? If you drew a tic-tac-toe board on the page there would be nine divisions surely, but if design limitations state you cannot place a page number in the middle of the page -- and surely they would -- then we must eliminate the middle square as a candidate. Once that is omitted, 8 remain).
The sets of 3 I can think of are:
Head type (if you imagine them spinning on a central axis, when returned to their upright position they will face Left or Right... which makes two, and the two of them together would make three); and
let's call it "value" (eg. Transparent Black, Opaque Black, or colored).
Again, the sets of 3 are ehhhhh... not solid. But they could lead to a new area of investigation.
But I think the year lines up perfectly. So add that to the pile.
EDIT: Oh yes, another set of three that could be derived is:
Neutral, Central, Entente
And, as an aside (mostly unrelated), I noticed that AGDfF with a X looks a whole bunch like ADFGX, which is a german cipher which preceeded the ADFGVX cipher, both of which were in use at that time.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADFGVX_cipher
