hings people have stared at for a long time without reading them. We like this shelf. It's honest about what we don't know.

The Voynich manuscript. About 240 pages in a script nobody reads, with drawings of plants that don't quite exist. Its vellum has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438). Held at Yale's Beinecke Library since 1969. (Beinecke Library, Yale, public domain)

Kryptos. A sculpture by Jim Sanborn, dedicated in 1990 at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Four encrypted sections. Most use a Vigenère cipher with an alphabet keyed on the sculpture's own name, KRYPTOS. Three were solved. The fourth, K4, has never been publicly solved; its plaintext turned up privately in Smithsonian archives in 2025 and was auctioned. It isn't public. (no photo here; the sculpture is a copyrighted artwork)

The Phaistos Disc. Fired clay, from Crete, found in 1908 by Luigi Pernier in the Minoan palace at Phaistos, probably 2nd millennium BC. A spiral of stamped signs on both sides, 242 of them, 45 different ones. Pressed with stamps, so in a sense it's printing. Unread. (homage drawing)

Linear A. Minoan writing, used from about 1800 to 1450 BC. Its descendant Linear B was deciphered in the 1950s and turned out to be early Greek. Linear A shares many of the same signs, and you can sound some of them out, but the language underneath still doesn't make sense to anyone. Someone has tucked a catalogue card in here, marked L.