In 2020 Brooklyn’s Honey & Wax Bookseller came into possession of a strange manuscript consisting of 7,000 illustrations, each 3 centimeters square. The images fill 106 loose sheets that often mimic European tourist brochures, and most bear captions that resemble no known language. The manuscript appears to have been created in Switzerland in the 1940s, but no one knows who created it or why. Notre Dame historian of science Robert Goulding wrote, “The fact that [the words] don’t seem to conform to any language or phonemes in any language is suspicious … suggesting to me that they are either a cipher, or there is some method or algorithm used to generate the words.”